Next one, people! Spoilers for Episode Nine, "Nightmares and Daydreams." (That's right; I can even get Taang out of that. Behold my canon bending powers…)

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The sound chakra is the chakra of truth.

It is blocked by lies.

The lies we tell ourselves, to be more accurate….But he certainly wasn't lying to himself now, was he? Aang did not think his brain possible of deceiving him any more than it already had in the past few hours….

His nerves were a mess. An absolute, undeniable, jumbled mess, starved of sleep and glutted on worry. After three days, of course, his reality and his dreams had started to run together like watery paints, creating a muddy world where Aang wondered what it was like to go insane (he would never look at Appa and Momo the same way again, that was for sure.) Rest would have put the colors back in order, of course….

But he couldn't rest.

He wouldn't rest, to be more specific.

Aang had refused to let himself sleep until this war was over. He was so, so close right now that he could almost taste it, as bloody and bittersweet a taste that it was. And thus the metaphorical blade that was his confrontation with the Fire Lord inched closer to his neck.

I'm not ready to do this, Aang told himself over and over: because along with its proximity came its unbearable weight. Doubts overwhelmed him, and he feared failure more than ever now, the dark possibilities drumming on his skull.

He could lose.

He could fail the world again.

And above all, he could fail Katara: his loose tongue had almost confessed that she was his real reason for fighting, and it was only pure luck that saved him from pouring out his most embarrassing secret to her.

(Although for a moment after he had awoken from one of his nightmares, a terrible fear had invaded him as he remembered seeing a pair of empty sockets where green eyes should have been. Your face, your face, oh gods who did this to you, I'm so sorry that I didn't protect you, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, oh please, please don't die….)

So it came as no surprise, when the Avatar saw the fluffy bed sitting there, that he would write it off as another product of his deteriorating mental condition.

"Oh look", he slurred cynically, "Another hallucination. An imaginary bed made out of clouds."

He poked it, pushed his face against it: it sure felt real enough…

"HEY!" barked an instantly recognizable voice. "It's real! We spent hours making it for you!" Toph told him frankly, her arms crossed in their usual fashion as she addressed him.

His temper instantly flared, turning to his friends. Oh, so they were still pushing the whole sleep thing, were they? Easy for them to say, wasn't it? They weren't the ones facing the Fire Lord tomorrow, were they?

His mouth was working before he could stop it, all the worries spewing up like a geyser and turning into hot, garbled words that conveyed his panic, his fear, his doubts, all the things he had been telling himself lately. It was only when Katara's soft tone reached him that he took a breath at all, listening to her tell him that he was ready, that he had progressed and trained, that he could do this.

That was Katara for you, though.

She was always encouraging like that, and she had never doubted him for a second: even when it would have been better to have, when it would have been better to be harsh, to snap him back into reality. Same with Sokka, who chimed in with a smile at his doubtful friend.

But then, simply and unexpectedly:

"You're the man, Twinkletoes!"

For a moment, it stopped him absolutely dead, simply because he had not thought such words possible from Toph, of all people.

She had never, to his recollection, given him positive reinforcement of that sort before: it was always a sharp correction or a light insult, sometimes an approving nod accompanied by a few words of wisdom that just made him more frustrated, at the time.

And her harsher methods were always, in hindsight, for the better: He never would have learned earthbending otherwise, without that blunt, head-on approach that she took to everything.

...Which brought other words to his tired memory, of that first excruciating lesson with the blind girl: You've got the stuff, she had told him.

You're ready. Now do it!

He had "the stuff." He had what it took to be an earthbender.

He had what it took to hold his ground in front of an enormous obstacle…. and he had the guts and ability to conquer it.

And the most wonderful thing about Toph's constantly, sometimes abrasively, honest words, was that he knew he could always, always believe her.

She would never sugarcoat anything, or water anything down for him.

All that Toph knew about him was the truth, plain and simple.

And here, now, she had just told him outright that she believed in him.

So if Toph could believe in him…

Then there was no reason why he could not, as well.

Sighing satisfactorily, his whole body slackening as it drained of three days worth of tension, Aang lowered himself into the soft bed.

"You know what?"

Another stifled yawn.

"I think I am ready."

And it is opened by trust.

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Thanks for reading!