"You're saying that Aang is the Avatar," stated Toph, incredulous. "Master of all elements, the person who can operate every single failsafe, famously disappeared when the world needed them the most. The Avatar that Zuko's hunting. That Avatar."

"Yup. That's the one." Sokka didn't feel nearly as flippant as he sounded.

"I never wanted to be the Avatar!" cried Aang.

Toph spun on him faster than a boomerang. "You little turd. You knew?"

"No! I mean, well, not exactly…"

"Explain. Now," demanded Sokka. He'd had a hard enough time accepting that the failsafes existed and the Avatar might be a remote possibility, and that was twelve hours ago. To go from that to standing in the same room as said – and presumably very dead – Avatar was a strain even on Sokka's prodigious mental capacity.

"They were going to tell us, the next day. Who the Avatar was. And there were only eight of us kids the right age at the monastery, so it had to be one of us, but –"

"This is like the Dalai Lama, right?" Toph interrupted, turning to Sokka for clarification. "The Avatar Spirit was believed to be reincarnated into a particular religious sect or something?"

Sokka nodded. Close enough, although who knew exactly how these forgotten customs played out.

Well, Aang, clearly.

"— and everyone kept looking at me, because I'd unlocked my chakras and gotten mastery, but it didn't have to be me. It could have been any of the others, too!"

"Really?" Sokka was skeptical. "Literally anyone could have developed that kind of power? I'd presumed it was a freak of genetic luck. Even in this mutant age."

"The Avatar's not a god," said Aang. "They're not supposed to be. They're meant to represent humanity. How could they do that without even being human?"

Sokka bit his lip to keep from commenting on just how much of Earth's population no longer strictly fit that criterion.

"You could be the Avatar, if you were chosen," Aang insisted, and this time Sokka openly laughed. Aang frowned but returned to his previous topic. "Besides, they kept saying that they'd take the Avatar away, for more training, and I didn't want to leave Gyatso. How could I do that to Gyatso?"

Aang's distressed arm-waving was enough to start small wind currents in the stale air of the lab. Sokka had no doubts as to how this conversation would be stopped right there for a therapeutic cry if there had been a sympathetic soul like Katara present. Hell, even Zuko was softer than Sokka and Toph about this stuff, although Sokka could only imagine how the Fire Prince would react to finding out he'd had the Avatar effectively captured all along.

"You ran away, didn't you," said Sokka, blunt.

"Yeah," sighed Aang, hands stilling, miserable. "Everything was going to change. It was all so messed up. The monks kept saying that Fire Lord Sozin was angry enough to destroy the world, that mutually assured destruction was imminent, and that the failsafes had to be used now or never. And it would be the Avatar's job to do that. To re-shape the world, when it… it's not even that broken, is it? In the end?"

Sokka stared, incredulous. "What the fuck makes you think that this world is okay?"

"It's – " Aang went back to playing a one-kid ventilator. "It's not so terrible! There's a lot of ice, yeah, but that helps people stay safe! And it's fast to travel across, and we still have fun together. Everyone I've met so far seems to do okay."

"If you call surviving rather than living okay," Sokka bit out. "You could have stopped all of this from ever even happening. The whole apocalypse. I could be a teenager right now, instead of halfway through my fucking life expectancy."

"I – " Aang looked down, tears wetting the corners of his eyes. When he met Sokka's gaze again, his eyes were desperate. "So many people would have died."

"So many people did die!" Sokka was yelling now, and the guards by the door were giving each other cautionary glances. At least he was yelling in Mandarin, so hopefully they just assumed he was pissed off at Aang. Which would be an accurate assessment.

"One person can't re-make the world just because they have the power to!"

"And what if it was the right thing to do? Aang, that's what the failsafes were for. Are for. So that if… when… we broke the world, we at least had a shot at putting it back together." Sokka had no idea if the terraforming machines of legend were still operational, but he didn't think he was wrong when he assumed that humanity had missed its shot. As a species, they had a track record of that kind of thing.

"You know what they say. Hindsight's twenty-twenty," quipped the local blind girl, breaking Sokka out of his stare down of the guilty child Avatar. "So what did happen, Aang? It's not just the Avatar who can control a failsafe. They're the only one who can make all of them work in harmony, but there were plenty of other people who could operate the individual ones, right? Couldn't the Earth or Fire failsafe have stopped the bombs? Swallowed them right up in their bunkers or exploded them harmlessly somewhere?"

"I mean, I guess so," Aang sniffled, wiping at his eyes with a palm. "I wasn't around to find out. After I ran away, I got caught in a huge storm. I don't know if it was natural, or if someone was messing with the Ocean or the Air, but the last thing I remember was feeling cold. And then a few weeks ago I woke up on Zuko's ship."

Sokka could believe that much of Aang, at least. But something else was bothering him now. "You know, Toph, for someone born in this century, you sure know a lot about the failsafes."

"What are you trying to say, Snoozles?" Toph challenged, blind eyes narrowed.

"That the game's up," Sokka declared. "Want to tell us why you were really in cryo? Coincidentally at the same facility as Aang?"

"No, I don't. You tell me, Mr. Genius."

"Fine." Two could call each other's bluff, and the picture that had been slowly coalescing in Sokka's mind over the past weeks had suddenly come into focus. "You can operate one of the failsafes, potentially. You've got the elemental connection it takes to understand Earth, at least, given your mutation. And you weren't the only one with something like that. Every single person who was in hibernation there did too. Darwin was attacked by the Southern Raiders, but they left once they'd gotten what they came for."

Toph kicked at the floor, the scrape of it sounding harsh in the silence. "Shit. How long have you known?"

Sokka shrugged, the movement settling him back into what Katara called his annoying know-it-all persona. "I know you've been hiding something since the beginning, but I wasn't sure until just now."

"You're good," praised Toph, before her expression turned crafty once more. "So do you know about Zuko?"

"What about Zuko?" She'd lost the last bluff, and if Sokka knew one thing about Toph it was that she hated losing. But this was just getting pathetic now.

"Hah. You don't know."

"What he's going to do about the Avatar?" Sokka asked the logical question. "For the record, he did say to me once that he wouldn't drag a kid back to the Fire Lord to be experimented on, but I think it's a stupid idea to tell him about Aang any time soon. Or, you know. Ever."

Toph was still wearing what could only be called a shit-eating grin as she sing-songed: "You have no idea."

That was a challenge if ever Sokka heard one. He picked up a few of the most obscure threads he could find, followed them to their inevitable conclusions, and resisted the urge to slap a palm to his forehead. Of course. "Zuko was genetically engineered to operate the Fire failsafe. Thanks to the Southern Raiders, the Fire Nations have people to operate Earth, Air, Ocean and Moon, and with Zuko – or maybe his sister, his backstory's pretty confusing and also fucked up – they have Fire. Now all they need is the Avatar, and they can make the world in their own image."

"Okay, so that first part was what I was getting at," admitted Toph, tone unsteady. "The rest is just scary depressing. Shit, is that what they're really going for?"

Aang's eyes were wide as small moons when he finally spoke. "We really shouldn't tell Zuko, right? Even if he's my friend?"

Sokka nodded, grim. "Hate to break it to you, Aang, but I'm pretty sure Zuko cares more about his honor than his friends. If he even has any friends," he added as an afterthought.

Toph scoffed. "If anyone's Zuko's friend, buddy, you are."

Take one frigid swim with a guy and people just assumed shit. Sure, they had a good rapport, but that did not a friendship make. "We're not friends."

"Right," said Toph, tone dry. "People don't usually want to bone their friends."

Well, Sokka had a pair of working eyes for one thing, which Toph certainly didn't. Nevertheless, he refused to rise to her bait. "I do not! And anyway, that's neither here nor there."

"I see the way you look at him," cackled Toph.

"There's so much wrong with that statement that I'm not going to dignify it with an answer," replied Sokka, incredulous.

"I'm Blind, not blind," Toph shot back, earning a soft giggle from Aang.

"I get it!" he cried. "The word for 'blind' in Mandarin has only its literal meaning when borrowed into in Creole, while the Creole word is mainly figurative."

"Gold star," said his teacher, generously, patting his hand. "Good to know the Avatar is finally learning to talk like real people."

Aang's grin vanished at that bleak reminder. "I mean… we still don't know for sure that it's me!" He gestured enthusiastically with his hands. Across the room, a sheaf of papers noisily fluttered into a neat stack.

"Uh… about that," started Sokka, staring.

"Hey, Airhead," said Toph. "Guess what your elemental connection is."

"But I don't have a mutat—" Aang cut himself off, finally noticing the papers. He looked down at his hands, then back up. "Oh, shit."

Toph cackled and held up hand for blind high-five. Sokka groaned, feeling a headache forming. What kind spirit story had his life turned into?

Speaking of headaches, he could hear Pakku's footsteps in the hall. "Okay, so we're agreed," he hissed quickly, snapping his fingers to draw the kids' attention. "We do not fucking tell Zuko."

As it turned out, it was easy not to tell Zuko because between working with Pakku to find a way to replace Aang's ancient cybernetics and the military leaders constantly hounding Zuko for information, Sokka barely saw him.

He barely even saw Katara; the powers-that-be were intent on keeping their travel group apart, Sokka could tell. A necessary precaution, he supposed, and all in all a small price to pay for not being dead. But although he would never admit it out loud, he missed his sister.

He might even, if pressed, admit to missing Zuko too. But certainly not to Katara.

"You do," she insisted, intent on causing trouble. "It's okay to say it. You two really bonded during our trip. To say nothing of your crazy break-in here. Which I am still upset about, by the way."

"Shut up," Sokka protested, half-heartedly. It was amazing how low his will to argue was when he'd already spent all day doing so with Pakku. Sleep deprivation might have played a small part in it, too. "Anyway, it doesn't make sense to miss someone I'm actively trying to avoid."

Katara snorted, casting a judgmental glance at the way he was draped over the furniture. "You don't have the energy to actively avoid anyone."

Accurate, in a way, since it was how she'd managed to tear him from his work without the promise of delicious meat. Sokka still had a thousand things to do, and that was just for Aang. Toph's state was far less complicated, but she still needed a few adjustments to ensure she'd stay healthy for the next decade.

"Hey. Sokka." Katara's tone was suddenly serious.

"Yeah?"

"I've been thinking."

Sokka groaned. "Stop mooning over Yue." Every time he'd seen Katara in the past few days, she'd been unable to shut up about the princess.

"I don't only think about Yue," Katara replied, snippily. "Although I thought you'd be grateful that we can count on having at least one ally here."

"We're all your allies," Sokka couldn't resist the double meaning. "But for someone supposed to be training with Master Yugoda, you don't seem quite as interested in winning her… trust."

Katara had the grace to flush slightly at that. "I just feel like Yue and I have this fundamental connection, you know?"

Sokka did not know, but that didn't mean he wanted to constantly hear about it. "Stop flirting with foreign royalty," he ordered.

"You know I'm not gonna fight you for Zuko, bro."

Sisters, what the fuck. "Shut up!" It was the most eloquent thing Sokka could come up with on the spot, having suddenly been assaulted by the memory of Zuko's warm arms around him and steady breaths at his back. "And anyway. Even if I did, hypothetically, like him."

"Hypothetically," mouthed Katara, making air quotes with her fingers.

Sokka couldn't believe they were wasting their precious time talking about such dumb trivia as who liked who. "I'm not stupid," he continued. "I know that Aang's the Avatar and I'm keeping that from him. Because no matter how much I believe he might actually care for the kid and have a, you know, human moral backbone, the man is still an Imperial Tracker. Those protocols of his are no joke. I'm not going to bet on Fire Lord Father-of-the-Year having left his son with even a modicum wiggle room in this capture-the-Avatar arrangement. I'm ninety-nine percent sure Zuko's got a geo-activated kill switch, that's exactly how serious the "come back on your shield or not at all" schtick is. We'll be lucky if we can part ways on good terms before Zuko finds out, and then even luckier if we're dead before he finds out and comes back to kill us all."

"How romantic," was Katara's oh-so-helpful contribution to that. Sokka glared at her. "Listen, I know I don't quite understand the whole killer-robot side of Zuko like you do. But he's kept his word to us. He hasn't harmed us. Nor Aang and Toph, and as far as I know he's made no such promises to them."

"You're making a convincing argument for me to have feelings for him, sister dear."

"I just want you to be as happy as I am," Katara sing-songed, mockingly. "Seriously, though. I do. But I understand that now is not the time."

"Do you?" Sokka wondered, because, well. Her massive crush on Yue.

"Unless you think it could lend you an edge in figuring out exactly why the Fire Nations need the Avatar so much." Katara's tone was sly.

Sokka snorted. "I resent the implication that I need to seduce anyone into giving up their secrets."

To her credit, Katara looked sheepish. "Sorry. Bad joke."

Sokka accepted her apology with a sharp nod. "Besides, as I already said. There's only one reason the Fire Nations want the Avatar."

"See, that's the part that I don't understand," Katara protested. "If they already have people who can use the power of each failsafe, why do they even need the Avatar?"

"I don't know the science behind it," Sokka started.

"Lore, Sokka. Just call it lore."

Sokka ignored her. "But think about it. There's got to be something special about the Avatar that makes it all – come together, for lack of a better way of saying it. Remember what Toph told us? They were waiting for technology to catch up, because every time someone tried to use a failsafe, they'd die."

"Then why didn't the Southern Raiders take everyone from Darwin? I wouldn't put it past the Fire Lord to just go through them one at a time. As horrible as it sounds."

"Maybe technology's caught up."

They were silent for a moment, pondering that sobering thought.

"Then why not keep Zuko at home?" asked Katara. "Why send him to find the Avatar, who no one's seen nor heard of for hundreds of years?"

"Maybe Ozai's already got the child he needs," said Sokka. "Zuko's got a sister. What if she's already proven she can use the failsafe, and survive? Zuko becomes useless to the Fire Lord, and let's face it. He can be a stubborn, outspoken asshole."

"No wonder you like him."

Sokka wondered why Katara kept talking when she knew he'd ignore half her dumb statements. "So why not send him off on a snipe hunt on the off chance that you'll get something supremely useful out of it? Kill two birds with one stone. And anyway, even if Zuko's sister has successfully harnessed the power of the Fire failsafe, that still leaves Earth, Air, Ocean and Moon. Maybe they've got enough bodies to power that up for the number of times that they need, but with the Avatar… well, according to Toph, people didn't die like that when the Avatar was around."

Katara sighed. "You're right. It makes sense. And it explains why everything fell into legend. No one's successfully used a failsafe in centuries, and they were pretty big secrets to start with. So with no evidence of their existence… here we are."

"Yup," agreed Sokka. "Screwed," he summarized.

Katara made a face at him. "Maybe there's something we're missing. It can't hurt to get Zuko's side of the story. Just try and talk to him anyway. Wait, no. Scratch that. You talk a lot. Try to actually communicate with him."

Sokka groaned, but nodded anyway. He hated it when Katara made sense.

Unfortunately, an idea making sense didn't make it any easier to execute. Case in point, the ridiculous requirements of the tech required to keep Aang from exploding in a ball of unlimited cosmic energy. It made perfect sense to replace his flex-Si-con chips with their functionalities tattooed under his skin instead of imperfectly embedded in it. It did not make it any easier to figure out a way of keeping Aang's potential under wraps while the thirty-six hours of incredibly detailed 3D printing took place.

Aang, being the altruistic cherub that he was, had suggested staying awake and meditating during the whole process. Sokka, who had at this point been awake for thirty-six hours himself and was nowhere near a zen headspace, immediately nixed this idea. Pakku had thought that putting Aang into temporary cyro-stasis might work, but Sokka had argued that based on previous iceberg-based data, it might have been those same massive energy reserves they were trying to avoid that had kept Aang in stasis the first time. In the end, they'd finally worked out a replacement pattern that had an 85% chance of keeping things successfully under wraps. The new tattoos would be designed to illuminate at any sign of malfunction or unexpected energy release, so they could act as a warning even as they were being installed.

There wasn't much to do while monitoring the procedure, so Sokka spent his shifts tinkering. He'd finished Toph's upgrades two days ago and she'd tested perfectly. He was looking for a distraction more than anything when he came across the prosthetic. Sokka felt himself perk up instantly, mind running through specs and requirements in the background as the foreground was occupied with stupid, meaningless things like how Zuko's expressive face might break from its habitual frown upon seeing it… ugh, so maybe he didn't hate the guy.

Sokka glanced at the clock, then settled rapidly into his new project, willing the minutes until the end of the shift to pass by.

He desperately wanted sleep, although he also wanted to find Zuko.

But first, meat.

"Hey, buddy," Sokka groaned as he forlornly regarded the bottom of his empty bowl of stew. At least the universe had delivered him this much; a portion of relatively tasty meat, and the very person he needed to talk to.

"Hey, how are you," said Zuko, the pleasantry falling flat with fatigue. He still didn't sound nearly as exhausted as Sokka did, the bastard. "Has Aang been keeping up with his self-study?"

"He'll still be asleep for another day or so while we see if the new cybernetics take."

"Oh."

Time passed in a blurry, achy haze that was at least less cold and lonely now that Zuko was there. "Hey I know it's not sleep but. I've got a proposition for you," Sokka came back to himself eventually, just in time to internally facepalm at his phrasing. Fortunately, Zuko didn't seem to notice, just cocking his one eyebrow. "I know it's not your father's love and affection—" and Katara was right, Sokka had no filter when he was this tired "– but do you want a new eyeball?"

Zuko's eyes were both as wide as they could go at this suggestion. Before he could properly respond, Sokka unceremoniously pulled the case out of his bag and plopped it on the table, popping open the lid as he did so. A crystal-blue iris stared up at both of them.

Zuko stared back at it for a moment, then looked away.

"You don't have to." Sokka started babbling to break the tension. It was a stupid idea, he'd known it was stupid, but he'd felt guilty and he knew it was nothing compared to a proper Tracker eye, either in capabilities or what it symbolized, so he'd done it even if he expected to be turned down anyway. It was all cool, though; Sokka would just brush it off with some snarky remark about how it wasn't his fault that Zuko couldn't adult and go to a cybermech once every three years –

"Yes," interrupted Zuko.

"What?" Sokka blinked.

"I –" Zuko looked back at Sokka now. A myriad of emotion was written on his face; resignation, gratitude, the beginnings of hope. "Please," he added, and that was all that needed to be said.

Zuko wanted him there, for the surgery. Sokka would really rather not. Katara was the one with an actual interest in medical goings-on, and who was far less squeamish when it came to blood. Sokka had tried, though, and made it as far as the buzz cut and anesthetic before he'd bowed out of the operating room.

When they wiped away the last of the fluids and Zuko opened his eyes, it was unexpectedly beautiful.

"Hey," Sokka said, admiring his handiwork, watching the bright blue iris slowly focus. I did that, he thought, with the characteristic pride that came with a completion of a new project. But different from that, a new thought: I did this. For him.

Leaning back from his inspection, he was momentarily taken aback by mismatched colors. An eye was just an eye, after all, and for some reason he wasn't expecting that it would be anything other than fiery gold, now that it was Zuko's.

"You can change the color," Sokka explained, hastily, eyes darting back and forth between blue and gold.

"I don't mind." Voice still hazy from drugs, Zuko nevertheless sounded… happy. "I can see. Just like… just like I remember. Thank you, Sokka."

"You're welcome." Something in Sokka thrilled to hear those words, and he busied himself with handing the other man a mirror. "You could, though. So it's more like how the real one was."

Zuko only glanced at the mirror, before looking back at Sokka. "I don't mind," he repeated. "I like it. It reminds me of you."

Sokka's lungs malfunctioned for a hot second, and his traitorous brain considered that Katara and Toph might have had the tiniest fraction of a point with their assessments of how he felt about Zuko. Thankfully the next thing that happened was that guilt hit him like a hammer, and damn it, Katara was right. Sokka couldn't continue lying to the guy, if he wanted to keep what they had, much less progress it. And what was even more dangerous was that he no longer wanted to.

Sokka pasted on what he hoped wasn't an overly awkward smile, accompanied by two thumbs up, and against his far better judgement, resolved to actually talk to Zuko about the Avatar.

It took another round of sleep-deprivation and a new science project for Sokka to work up the nerve. But there wasn't really a better time and place than this, in the dead of night on Zuko's ship, parked now in a concealing snowbank on high ground a few kilometers outside of the main habitation.

Sokka had suggested using the ship to extend the baseline of their radio array in order to reconstruct intercepted transmissions on a finer scale. A few more tweaks and he'd have the calibration just so; then there would be nothing left to do but… talk. Ugh.

"Time to test," Sokka said finally, putting down the tablet. "We'll try for a quick image with the infrared interferometer first. Monitor the screen for me?"

Zuko nodded, and took the pilot's seat while Sokka squeezed into the navigations corner, made even more cramped now by additional equipment.

"It shouldn't look like much," explained Sokka, deeming the integration time sufficient and starting the image reconstruction algorithm while he went through the instrument diagnostics.

"Got it!" he heard from the cockpit, and then a weird strangled sound.

"Zuko?" Sokka looked up from the monitor, curious. "Everything okay?"

"Uhhh…"

That was enough to catapult Sokka the two-and-a-half meters to the cockpit. "What is it?"

Zuko looked like he'd seen a ghost. Which, okay, was actually a strong possibility, their dynamic range wasn't great and ghost images were not infrequent when it came to Fourier imaging. "If the point-spread function is visible, it's not real—"

"It's real." Zuko cut him off abruptly, and leaned to the side so Sokka could get a better view over his shoulder.

"What is that?" he wondered, unease building in his mind the more he looked at it. It was a sigil of some kind, but without any context Sokka was at a loss.

"It's the royal family's symbol." Zuko expanded the image field of view, revealing a tight cluster of parked battle cruisers. "It's Azula. My sister."

A/N: Some inside jokes in that last section regarding radio telescope image reconstruction... and then blatant lies, as you'd never get an actual image of something like a logo from such a telescope.

I'm never not going to make moon puns about Yue...

The true pairing here, as you can clearly tell, is Sokka x meat

I commissioned a drawing of Aang with his new tattoos/cybernetics, so check back in a few weeks to see it! I'm certain it will be fantastic :) Or follow my tumblr at d-naggeluide