Understanding
It isn't until she feels Sokka's hand grip tightly around her that Toph begins to truly wonder what's actually happening.
It isn't really her fault. She's tired – exhausted, really, in a bone-deep kind of way that she hasn't ever really felt. She's starving, longing in a petulant sort of way that makes her ashamed, for the high-class meals she had left behind not weeks earlier. She's dehydrated, and every tiny movement of her aching limbs sends a spasm of pain across the entirety of her body to remind her of that fact. Her lips are chapped. Her skin is blistered, and she can already feel her cheeks peeling against the onslaught of the sun. Toph isn't used to this kind of unabashed heat, and her skin will surely burn. To top all of that off, she's half-blind in a way that is very unfamiliar to her, barely able to see through the shifting fog of never-ending sand. And that's to say nothing of the cloud of guilt that hangs over her, spurned on by her certainty that, through the haze of her vision, Aang is glancing darkly at her every chance he gets.
There's nothing about the situation they're in that makes any kind of sense.
She wonders idly if she ought not to have been surprised by the arrival of the Sandbenders. Things so very rarely go well for them – a fact that seems all the more potent given their present circumstances. She wonders also if she maybe ought not to have mentioned the way she recognized one of their voices.
It had been a reflexive thing, born of her exhaustion and distraction. The man's voice had just been so grating in its arrogance. It was high and nasally in that way all the worst kinds of men who had visited her father over the years had been. She hadn't half realized she'd even been speaking. She hadn't expected Aang to overhear. Or, rather, she hadn't thought he would – hadn't even really thought whether or not it would matter if he did.
She realizes now that it matters very much. To him. To the Sandbenders. If the way the both of them tense, as if in preparation for something she cannot perceive in any indication, it matters to Sokka and Katara as well.
Toph does not need to wonder if it was a good idea to so blatantly inform Aang about the muzzling. It was, she thinks to herself in a kind of stunned, blank silence as Aang casually decimates these people's livelihoods, a very bad idea.
"You muzzled Appa?" Aang growls, and at this point, Toph isn't yet concerned. Aang is angry, but she has seen him angry before. She has heard him angry before. At his worst, he is petulant and whiny, with a tendency to yell in a voice that lacks intimidation if he is truly pushed too far. She has seen it directed at herself when she was handling his first Earthbending lessons. In comparison to her own unshakeable attitude and stubbornness, the way he had shouted at her over his staff had been, frankly, amusing.
It is the immediate seconds that follow his question that begin to worry her.
On the shifting sands of the desert, Toph's vision is fuzzy at best. Everything's always shifting as if she's seeing everything in triplicate. Like this, she cannot discern Sandbender from Sandbender. She can tell where they are, in general and make a fuzzy count of how many of them there are, but she cannot discern the details of their clothing, their bodies or their stances. She cannot tell male from female, and if she cannot hear them, she cannot tell one from the other. Familiar as she is with them, she is not so hamstrung where her friends are concerned. To her left, roughly five to seven feet away, Katara is hovering worriedly. One of her hands has risen up to grasp at her arm – an expression of nerves, Toph has come to understand. So close beside her that she can feel the wind break against his skin, Sokka is hovering protectively. Toph would punch him for this and scowl, but she is too deep into her half-blind exhaustion to argue her current vulnerability. This close to what is obviously a group of enemies, she will allow him to hover. And Aang…she pauses.
There is something different about Aang. Even through the haze of the sand, she can see – feel – that he is changed. His feet, normally so feather light as to be nonexistent, have anchored themselves within the sand, as if the boy has gained density in the moments between then and now. His stance is, likewise, rigid and stonelike. There is no give in the tight, tautness of his muscles. He is, now more than she has ever seen him, a rock, unmoving, unyielding.
This is to say nothing of his voice.
An enormous whoosh of air, far more powerfully pressurized than it has any right to be here in this windless desert, followed by another cacophonous explosion tells her that Aang has destroyed another of the Sandbenders' sand-sailors. She has to rely on her other senses in the wake of his newest attack, because the vast displacement of so much sand by Aang's wind turns what little vision she has into a sightless, fuzzy cloud.
"I'm sorry!" the pathetic man is shouting over the din of Aang's destruction. There is desperation in his voice – not much unlike the desperation of Appa's resistance to them, Toph notes with some cruel glee. She is smart enough not to voice this thought. "I didn't know it belonged to the Avatar!"
"Tellme where Appa is!"
"I traded him!" the man is shouting desperately, but Toph does not hear this or whatever attempts at justification follow.
Aang's voice has sent a thrill of terror down her spine, and against all odds, she shudders in the desert heat.
For as long as she can remember, Toph has never allowed her blindness to impede the way she lives her life. She is certain there was a time before the Badgermoles, when she was truly, inescapably blind, that she had been somewhat more hamstrung, but she has no recollection of this. On solid, unyielding ground, she has never been as helpless or as frail as the world believes her to be. If anything, she has been that much more aware of her surroundings than those around her. But the inescapable truth of her life is that she is blind, and there are aspects of her life that are lacking as a result. Namely, that she cannot perceive emotion as instantaneously as others. She has to rely on body language – which can be deceiving – or, more often, the way people speak.
She has never heard Aang speak like this. In fact, she is not entirely certain at the moment that Aang is the one speaking.
The man has finished his ridiculous explanation, and the wind has picked up. It is different this time – directionless and wild. There is sand whipping into her face, and her eyes water in an effort to cleanse themselves of the newfound irritant. Beneath her feet, the already uneven sands shift ever more, twisting like the waves of an ocean into a wild, angry organism that bites at her feet and twists through the ground. At the center of this maelstrom, she can still see, is Aang. Or, what she thinks is Aang. His posture is still entirely incorrect, his feet are still placed far too firmly and the rigid set of his arms and neck may as well be stone. This is not her friend. This is not Twinkletoes.
What is happening? she wonders.
Sokka's hands latch tightly to her shoulders, and his voice is shouting urgently into her ear. "Just get out of here!" he screams. His grip on her is painful, and it does not ease up as he pushes her forward almost violently. "Run!"
He is desperate, she realizes in a moment of clarity. Desperate to move her, such that he is practically dragging her forward. He does not trust her to move, does not trust her to understand the gravity of whatever is going on, and that makes sense. She doesn't. She does not understand why Sokka is suddenly sprinting with all his might towards the people they had just been standing off against, nor does she understand why those same people have begun to scatter. They are fleeing like rats in random directions, unheeding of where their comrades are going, and she and Sokka are going with them. They are running, sprinting, fleeing with all of the energy left in their legs. Fleeing, Toph realizes all at once, from Aang.
Amidst the chaos of this realization and the fervor of the maelstrom they have found themselves in, it takes Toph a moment to realize that Katara has not followed them. Toph, at this point, can barely perceive anything beyond the shifting tides of sand that Aang has somehow kicked into a frenzy, but she can still see her. She is as resolute as she ever is, the rock amidst the broiling ocean, the anchor they have all tied themselves to. Toph had not, until this moment, truly come to understand what Katara was to this group of ragtag children. What Katara was to her and certainly not what Katara was to Aang.
She and Sokka are easily two hundred feet or better from Aang, but his grip on her shoulder has not lessened. He still holds to her as tight a shackle, forcing her to stay where she was, as if there was ever a chance she would have willingly approached whatever the hell was happening with her previously unassuming friend. And yet, there is Katara, shining through the haze of her faltered vision like a beacon of serenity and surety. A beacon Toph is certain even Aang could see in the fugue state of anger and rage he is in.
When the maelstrom had died, and the winds had settled and the sands had stopped shifting and Toph was back to her normal brand of half-sight, she and Sokka were slow to approach. That is to say, Sokka approaches slowly, and he did not allow her to approach any faster. She could see the two of them very clearly. Whatever it was that Aang had done, it had drained him. He is slumped haphazardly into the sand, leaning heavily on Katara as she holds him close. In contrast to the chaos the world had been not moments ago, the silence is deafening.
At last, Sokka releases her. He leans down to place a comforting hand on the Avatar's shoulder, and though Toph cannot see his face, she imagines it is as reassuring as his grip.
A rapid series of vibrations race through the sands and up into her feet, synchronized with the movement of Aang's head as he lifts his gaze to stare at her. At least, this is what Toph assumes that Aang is doing, based on her limited perception of him.
His words are directed at her, and so she assumed she is right. "I'm sorry for scaring you." His voice is choked by tears and sobs that have stuck in his throat.
Toph considers punching him, sneering at him and telling him that it's gonna take more than that to shake her. But she would be lying if she did that. Instead, she sits in the sand and lays her own dainty hand on him, joining herself to the composite organism of their suffering. It is her attempt to convey what comfort she can to the boy she is only just beginning to realize she does not understand near as well as she thought she did.