A/N: I'm back! ATLA is so incredible that it cured me of my "I don't write fanfiction anymore" delusions and made me write the majority of this in just two weeks! It is now done (~27,000 words) and will be posted in 9 weekly installments of 1,500-5,000 words each, depending on the chapter. The majority will be from Katara or Toph's POV, focused on their romance, but their families and friends are also very important to them and to the story. Zuko and Aang each have one chapter of their own.

Notes about my experience vs. my writing: I am a mixed Black queer teen from Massachusetts. I'm not blind, nor do I know any blind people personally. I'm not Inuit, and I don't know any Inuit people personally. I did research in order to write characters who aren't like me as well as I can, but if I messed something up, please tell me and I will fix it.

A note about inspiration: I wrote this because I was inspired by Avatar, obviously, but also by LA Web Series by Violet Wave Productions (available on Youtube) which I highly recommend you watch. Toph and I have both been listening to the song Jim Cain by Bill Callahan too much, so that's where the title and chapter titles come from. I'm also writing pretty directly about my experience as a teenage human in the United States in a pandemic. This was very therapeutic for me and it can be for you, but if constant discussion of coronavirus is just gonna stress you out, stop reading now.

Enjoy...

"Coming here was a good idea." Katara said.

"Agreed. You really needed to get rid of that t-shirt tan." said Sokka.

Katara slapped his shoulder gently with the back of her hand, but she was smiling. "C'mon. I mean because I feel happy. And peaceful."

Ocean foam rushed up the wet sand to lap her bare feet as if in agreement. As if it had missed her. She took one last look over both shoulders, up towards the parking lot, and saw no one. It was safe. Carefully, Katara unlooped her cloth mask from her ears, folded it, and placed it in the pocket of her shorts. The smell of the salty waves grew stronger and she smiled and the feeling of sea breeze on her cheeks. She hadn't been outdoors without a mask, except on her tiny balcony in the city, in four months.

"I wonder why no one else is here."

"Probably because it's 6:00AM, genius. Everyone less paranoid than us is still in bed." Sokka said.

Katara nodded. The sunrise-watching crowd had already passed through, but the sunbathers and wave jumpers hadn't yet arrived. There was nothing but open space around them, uncrowded with human bodies and uninfected by human breath. They were free.

She stepped into the thin layer of water that rose over the sand. On its way back into the ocean, she felt warm patches of ocean flow over her feet, heated by the morning sun. Sokka stayed onshore as Katara waded in up to her ankles, to her shins, to her knees. She stopped there, unwilling to let the mask in her pocket get wet, although she wanted to feel the power of the water all over her body. Another day, she thought. It was only their first morning. There would be a whole week of vacation to plan ahead, bring a bag for her mask, and dive in.

Then she saw the seal. It was only about 20 feet away, straight in front of her, head bobbing above the waves.

"Hi," she whispered. "Hi, friend."

It couldn't have heard her over the sound of the water, but it bobbed closer. Awe and joy grew in Katara's chest.

"Charge!" Sokka sprinted past Katara, waving his arms and splashing. The seal dipped below the surface and disappeared.

"Sokka! Stop! Why would you do that?"

"Fun!"

"STOP!"

"But why?"

"Because you're terrible!" Katara spluttered, wiping traces of Sokka's splashing from her face. "Your mask's in your pocket, right? So now it's soaking wet?"

Her tone was sharper than she wanted it to be, but all of the daily anxiety she had felt living in the middle of Boston in the pandemic came rushing back. Their father, a nurse, had told them over and over that wet masks are less effective at blocking the virus, but more effective at blocking the air they needed to breathe. Katara turned and scanned the beach again for people - all clear, as far as she could see.

"Oh, shit," Sokka followed Katara back onto the sand. "I was so excited, I totally forgot."

"I know." Katara tried not to sound resentful. "Let's just go back to the house and try again tomorrow morning. I'll bring a bag for our masks."

She turned back to look for the seal one more time, but it was gone.

Both teenagers put their masks back on before entering the parking lot, even though Sokka's was uncomfortably heavy with seawater. Two cars had arrived, and unmasked families were happily unloading beach toys. They gave them a wide berth, and headed for the narrow, pebbled path through the bushes to the house that they rented. Even though the rocks hurt their bare feet, they hurried to reduce the chance of passing another person. Whenever it was impossible to stay 6 feet from strangers, even when none were around, their hearts beat faster with anxiety.

At least Dad isn't here, Katara told herself. At least the risk of going to the beach in the first place only applies to us, and not to him. She sighed with relief when they reached the house they were renting without seeing anyone else.

But even that felt dangerous - to rent and live in a space that someone else had lived in before. They wiped everything with disinfectant when they first arrived, and kept every window open and every fan on high to clear the air. Even still, they slept that first night on the screened-in porch, hoping that it was close enough to being outdoors to keep them safe.

Katara tossed her mask into the "used" basket by the door and sat down heavily on the stoop to brush the sand from her legs.

"I call first shower!" Sokka yelled.

Katara didn't protest. She was barely dirty, and keeping traces of the ocean on her legs for a little bit longer sounded nice. Returning to the beach would be wonderful, but she knew that more cars and more people would already be pouring from the parking lot into the sand. Perhaps there was some other outdoor place she could explore instead. The house was lovely and she was, of course, privileged and grateful to have it, but there was only one room and the bathroom. After spending four months in their apartment with Sokka, she wasn't eager to spend even more time in a small space with him.

Once, at least two years before, they had rented a bigger house in the same neighborhood for a week. Their dad had come, of course, and their neighbors Aang and Gyatso. Sokka had even brought his best friend Suki. The four kids spent that whole week together, on the beach from sunrise to sunset. That was when Aang was still a foster child, before Gyatso adopted him. It was when Suki and Sokka were just "very close friends," and not yet dating. And of course, it was long before any of them knew what a coronavirus was.

"Sokka!" Katara called through the bathroom door. "I'm going for a walk around the neighborhood. I'll definitely be back before lunch, so don't eat without me."

"No promises!" he yelled back over the sound of the shower.

Katara rolled her eyes, put on shoes for the first time since arriving at the house, and looped a fresh mask around her ears. Before opening the front door, she looked both ways up and down the quiet street. No people. Safe.

She turned away from the direction that turned led to the beach. Instead, she walked uphill, away from the faint sound of the water. Katara passed other houses like the one she was staying in, most also rented by families looking to get away from their quarantine locations. There were no blind corners or speed walking pedestrians like the ones that had tormented her in Boston, just wide open streets free of both people and cars.

The direction Katara had chosen took her past houses that were farther and farther apart from each other. The paved road turned into dirt. Then, rather abruptly, the dirt road turned into a house's personal driveway, and the only way forward into the forest was a dirt trail only about a foot wide. A thin white rope was strung at hip height between the trees, marking the way forwards on both sides. With a growing sense of adventure and discovery, Katara began to follow the trail.

Only a few feet in, the trail split in two. Both of her options had a guard rope on only one side of the trail. On a whim, Katara picked right. The forest was dense and free of wildlife. At least, free of wildlife that Katara could see. The path was carefully cleared of sticks, rocks, and plants, but the ground was still uneven and hilly. At the crest of one small hill, she stopped to look down into a valley thick with trees, bushes, and vines. It was almost as calming to be here as it was to be at the edge of the sea.

Then she heard the breathing. From behind her, the sound of a pair of lungs working hard, rhythmically. Katara turned and saw a girl running towards her along the path, one hand grasping the guard rope, feet bare. Dread rose in her stomach when she realized that the girl had no mask and that the trail was far too narrow for her to pass safely. One or both of them would have to bushwhack into the brush to get past each other. And worse, the girl wasn't stopping or even slowing down.

"Look out!" Katara yelled.

The girl skidded to a halt about 15 feet away and let go of the rope to fumble in her pocket. Katara saw that she had a cloth mask. "Who's there?" she yelled back, hurriedly putting the mask on.

"I'm Kat- oh, shit. Yeah, Kat. I'm Kat." Katara said. She had always meant to choose a go-to fake name to give to strangers, but had never settled on one. Or if she had, she had forgotten it in the long months she spent indoors.

"The fuck kind of person doesn't know her own name," said the girl.

Katara bit her lip. "Well, what's yours?"

"Jessie." the girl said. "That's the name I give strangers. See, it's not so hard to pick one if you have half a brain."

Katara furrowed her brow. "That's rich, coming from someone who runs full tilt in the forest, without a mask on, with another person stopped right in front of her."

"I'm blind." said the girl.

"You what?"

"I'm blind. I can't see. You were standing still and being really quiet, so I had no way of knowing you were there. And I'm sorry, my first estimate was clearly too high - you can't have more than a quarter of a brain."

Katara was torn between the instinct to argue back and the shame she felt at yelling at a blind girl. The latter won out. "I'm so sorry. I had no idea! I shouldn't have assumed you could see, and I shouldn't have been mad at you for running-"

"I don't care," the girl said. "But… you haven't been getting your germy hands all over my ropes, have you?"

"What? No." Katara said truthfully. "I just walked next to them. And I've had my mask on the whole time I was here."

"Good." the girl said. "Can you come a little closer so we're yelling at each other less? Still stay 6 feet, of course."

"Of course." Katara said. She walked down the hill, closing most of the gap. "Is this better?"

"Sure. Now you can explain to me in detail why the hell you're in my backyard."

Katara opened her mouth to speak, but drew a blank. There was no good explanation. And there was no way she could have predicted that her first conversation with a new person in four months would be in a forest on Cape Cod with a very angry barefoot blind girl. Nothing had prepared her for this.

"I didn't… know it was your backyard?"

"The road ending in a driveway with my family's car parked in it, directly next to our house, didn't clue you in?"

"No."

"God, you're dumb. If my parents had been the ones to run into you here, they would have chased you off the property, if not called the police on you."

"Are you going to do that?" Katara asked seriously. She had always been afraid of the police, but being threatened while staying in a neighborhood where she knew no one while her father was still in Boston was a new level of fear. Only after she spoke did she realize that the girl couldn't see that she was a dark-skinned Inuk, and probably assumed from her voice that she was talking to a white girl. "Please don't do that." she added.

"No, I don't think I will." the girl said. "It's COVID times. I've only spoken to three people since my school closed in March. The rules are different now."

"Thank you." Katara sighed with relief. "So… what are you going to do?"

The girl tilted her head to one side in thought. "Um. Do you want to go hang out with me?"

Katara blinked. The girl's expression was dead serious. "Yeah. Why not?"

"Yeah. Why not." she repeated. "My name is actually Toph, by the way."

"Toph." Katara said. "I'm Katara. And nobody calls me Kat. Please don't."

"Heh. Maybe I will, just to spite you." Toph grinned crookedly. She pointed past Katara. "Keep walking that way. There's a clearing where we can sit down and chill for a while. Don't touch my rope."

"I won't." Katara promised. "Wait, do you need help walking?"

"Kat. The more you talk, the more concerned I am for your brain. You just saw me sprint along this trail with no problem at all. Of course I can walk." Toph said.

"Sorry, I'm sorry." said Katara again. It seemed safest to just walk forwards and stop talking. She was glad that walking single file, neither of them could see each other's faces.

"So how old are you? What do you look like?" Toph asked.

"I'm seventeen." said Katara. "And, uh… I'm Inuit."

"Inuit? Like, Native American?"

"Like, indigenous to the Arctic."

"Okay. Keep going."

"I'm taller than you. I think I'm 5'6" now. I have long hair in a braid and smaller strands of hair in loops on either side of my face. I'm wearing blue shorts and a tank top and converse sneakers. My mask is black. Yours is green, like your clothes."

"Dude, you should've quit while you were ahead. I know what I'm wearing. I picked green on purpose because I want to be the same color as the forest, even if I can't see it. I just asked about you."

Katara flushed bright red. "I'm so sorry-"

"Okay, I'm done with apologies. Calm down." said Toph. "I'm sixteen, since you asked."

"Oh. Cool." Katara bit her lip. It was overwhelming to have… what, a potential friend? A new person close to her age for the first time in months. A new person who didn't already know everything about her. It was exhilarating. And very scary. Especially because so far, she couldn't seem to say anything right.

"Bruh. You missed the clearing." Toph said. Katara turned and saw that Toph had ducked underneath the guard rope and was sitting in a relatively wide, flat space with only moss and small plants on the ground.

"Sorry." Katara felt like kicking herself for apologizing again. And for doing something stupid that required apologizing, again. She walked back a few feet and ducked under the rope as well - careful not to touch it - and sat down. "You know this place really well."

"Yep. My aide and I cleared the trail and the clearing and set up the guide rope. See the duct tape?" Toph pointed at the rope next to the clearing, and Katara saw that about a foot of it was covered with duct tape. "That's how I know where the clearing is. It's also the halfway mark for my running loop."

"Oh, cool." Katara said. "Who's your aide?"

"His name's Zuko. He's pretty cool. He helped me make the trail, and if I want to run somewhere other than this loop, he runs with me." Katara couldn't tell, but she thought that Toph might have been frowning under her mask. "No one but us and my parents has ever been in my loop before."

"Oh." Everything that Toph said made her think of a million more questions. Was Zuko Toph's age? Was he more of a friend, or more of a teacher? What could Toph do without him and what did she need him for?

"Are you scared to ask more questions?" Toph asked. She buried her hands in the leaf litter and began to fidget with a stick.

"No?" Katara said. "But… sort of?"

Toph rolled her eyes. "God, I had forgotten this part of meeting new people. It's fine. You can ask questions."

"Okay." Katara swallowed. "I guess… what can you do without Zuko? Like, how much is he part of your life?"

"Not that much anymore, honestly." Toph said. "He's lived with me for two years, and before that, I had a nanny. In March, when we first came here to our vacation house, I needed a lot of help finding everything and making this trail so I could go outside without help, but now I only hang out with him a little bit every day. We tell my parents he does more so that they keep paying him."

"That's kind of you."

"I hope so." Toph snapped her stick in half. "Tell me about you. Who do you spend the most time with?"

"My brother Sokka." Katara smiled at the thought. "He's nineteen. And my dad, but he's at home in Boston."

"Yo, you live in Boston? I live in Cambridge, right by the river."

"That's crazy! We're basically neighbors," Katara laughed.

"What do you like to do in Boston?" Toph asked.

"I don't go downtown much, especially now. I mostly stay in Oak Square, where I live, with my best friend Aang. We live in different apartments in the same tripledecker house. We hung out every day before we started social distancing. Then we had to figure out how to go for socially distant walks, and how to stay friends over facetime."

"Ugh. Facetime sucks. It's so far from being together in person." Toph said.

"Totally." They were both silent for a second.

"Sorry, I just don't know how to talk to people without talking about the pandemic."

"Don't apologize for that." Toph said sharply. "People who can talk without talking about it don't know how privileged they are."

Katara raised her eyebrows, thinking about the fact that she and Sokka were rich enough that they could spend a week on Cape Cod on only one adult's salary, and as an even more extreme example, Toph's family apparently owned a vacation home with a huge, forested backyard and could afford to hire a live-in aide. Their combined privilege was enormous.

"Yeah. I guess." she said.

"Did you hesitate because you were thinking about how rich I am?" Toph asked.

Katara blinked. She was still getting used to Toph's bluntness. "Uhh..."

"Because you should have been. I know that my parents are the people who can talk without talking about the pandemic. Their work was already basically nothing and totally doable online. So they do talk without talking about the pandemic, constantly. But I can't because, surprise surprise, it's really hard to translate the experience of going to an in-person school specifically for people with visual impairments. I get to deal with a massive disruption of my life from my vacation house, but it's still a massive disruption of my life."

Katara nodded in understanding.

"Does that make sense?" Toph asked.

"Yeah, sorry, I was nodding."

This time Toph didn't jump on Katara's apology. She just nodded back. "It takes practice."

"My life was disrupted, too." Katara said. "It's worse for my dad and Sokka. Dad's a nurse. He started working 60 hours a week. And Sokka was taking a gap year and working at the public library, but it closed. He was going to go to college in the fall. He still hasn't decided if he's gonna go."

"Ugh. The future." Toph hugged her knees. "The future sucks. Do you know what you're going to do? Like, after high school?"

"I think so," she said. "I think I want to be a nurse like my dad. So I would have to go to college and do a nursing program."

"That's cool. Especially now, that's a really good goal to have." said Toph. "I don't know what to do."

"Well, what do you like?"

"Running. And lifting weights." Toph said. "But I'm not that good at either. Like when I was little I thought I could go to the paralympics, but my times just aren't good enough. And I don't think my parents would let me anyway."

"Are they protective?" Katara asked knowingly, thinking of her own dad's obsession with protecting her and Sokka from the coronavirus over the last few months.

"Yeah. But I think the word I would use is clueless. It's like, I'm their token blind child. So they tell me that I can't do anything, and don't let me try things, but then when I do manage to do something they think I can't, it's all they talk about and all over their social media. So we're not close. But they're also not terrible. I have some freedom." Toph said. "Like back at the start of May when people started talking about making and wearing reusable masks in public, I decided I wanted to make some. So I bought myself a sewing machine and learned how to use it. Zuko traced and cut out the fabric, and then I was able to sew them together by feel. We ship them out to homeless shelters and food distribution sites."

"Woah! How many did you make?"

"Over 80 and counting." Toph smiled with pride. "It started out really slow, but Zuko and I are a lot faster now."

"I should have done that," said Katara.

"Hey," Toph said. She reached out as if to touch Katara, but of course they were too far apart. "You're too hard on yourself."

Katara chuckled a little, glad that Toph couldn't see her blush. Talking to a person who could only hear her was making her hyperaware of everything she could see. But honestly, all she was looking at was Toph. She could see the layer of dust clinging to the fine hairs on her legs, the veins in her feet, the shade her bangs cast on her face. It had taken most of their conversation, but she was finally getting used to the fact that she could stare straight into Toph's eyes without it being awkward, because she would never know.

"I like talking to you," Toph said.

Katara blushed. "Okay." Wait, that felt like the wrong thing to say. "I mean, uh..."

"It's okay. You don't have to like it back."

"No, I do. I actually do." Katara said. "Can I meet you here again tomorrow? Same time? Wait, what time is it now?" She fumbled with her phone in her pocket. "It's 8:00. Can we meet again at 8:00 tomorrow?"

"Yeah," Toph said. "It'll be nice to have another early morning riser around. But don't touch my ropes."

"I won't. I promise." Katara said again. "Will you walk me around the other side of the loop? I'm sure it's beautiful."

"I wouldn't know about beautiful, but it is fun to run," Toph said. "You lead the way."

They both stood and ducked back under the duct-taped guide rope. Katara walked straight down the middle of the path at an even pace, trying to make it easy for Toph to keep the right distance. Toph's bare feet were nearly silent compared to Katara's sneakered footfalls, so she began watching the rope beside her bounce with the movement of Toph's steps rather than listening to know she was there.

"I miss meeting new people," Katara said.

"Yeah, it's special," said Toph. "It's just another little thing we've lost this year."

"So talking to you is like getting it back," Katara replied.

"It is. You're welcome." Toph said. Katara glanced over her shoulder and saw that she was smiling.

"Hey, you're welcome, too. You owe this whole conversation to my daring decision to trespass."

"More like your oblivious, accidental trespassing, but okay, I'll let you take the win." Toph said.

"Thanks."

They walked in silence for a moment.

"Are you really going to come tomorrow?" Toph asked. "If you're not going to, then just tell me. I have other things I want to do instead of just waiting in the woods for you to show up."

"Yes. I'll come. I promise." said Katara.

The single-roped path merged with the other side of the loop, where Katara had started her walk, and both girls walked back up the entrance to Toph's driveway. Katara started to wave, then remembered that Toph couldn't see it.

"Bye, Toph. I'll see you tomorrow at 8." she said.

"Bye." Toph said. She shrugged and walked towards the house with no rope to guide her. She must have known the way well. Still, Katara watched until she saw the back door of the house close behind her.

That afternoon Katara found herself daydreaming on the porch. It wasn't that there was nothing to do - she could try going to the beach and hope there was space. She could write in her journal or watch Netflix, like Sokka was doing, or go for a walk to explore a new direction. She and Sokka could call Suki or Aang together to check in. Instead, she found herself unable to focus long enough to pick.

Her mind kept gravitating back to Toph.

Not just to Toph, but to all of the things they couldn't do together. They couldn't swim in the ocean. They couldn't cook or bake something new. They couldn't give each other tours of their rooms or do each other's hair. Katara had hoped that the impossibility of all of these ideas would make them easier to dismiss, but it didn't. It made her want them more.

An idea for something she could do occurred to Katara as her gaze passed over the bag of clean masks by the front door. She carefully retrieved a black bandana, which they kept in case they ran out of closer-fitting cloth masks. She folded it into a long, narrow strip and tied it over her eyes.

At once, she felt more… alone. She could hear cars from a distant road, or maybe that was the ocean. One bird repeated a two-note call. All she could feel were her clothes on her body and the woven mat beneath her feet.

In search of more information, more connections, Katara stepped forwards with arms outstretched. She reached nothing. Two more steps and she grazed the door with her fingertips and the concrete threshold with her toes. With her vision, the same distance felt much shorter, perhaps because she usually took longer, more confident steps.

She stepped through the door onto the flat stones that made up the walkway. With every new place her foot touched, she discovered new pebbles, sand, pine needles, grass, weeds, and moss. It was like exploring the ground in slow motion, or with a magnifying glass. It was fascinating. And it was Toph.

Katara imagined her new friend standing beside her, urging her her hands outstretched to touch Katara's. With her bare feet planted on the same ground. With her lips breathing the same air. She inhaled sharply. What had she been thinking, leaving the house with her eyes covered but not her mouth and nose? She pulled the bandana off from over her eyes and ran back inside. She closed the screen door tightly behind her, not because it actually made her safer, but because it made her feel just a little bit safer. She missed that feeling. She chased it constantly, even though it always led her back to being inside, alone.

A/N: Please review and follow! Updates will be every Tuesday for the next 8 weeks. You can also find me on instagram vikingfangirl23 and take a look at some fanart that I painted specifically for this fic :)