A/N: This was horribly hard for me to wright up because I'm not a big Suki fan. I don't think it turned out too badly though. Hopefully, you all agree with me!

-Suki-

It had been a long night for Sokka. His dreams were of memories, his memories of ashen covered snow and blood covered hands, and when his mind could supply no more horror stories to force him to remember, it would spin knew ones that were almost worse than the real ones. Ones where he lost Katara, where his village was destroyed, where everything around him went up in flames and there was nothing that he could do to stop it.

Eventually, after he woke up completely twisted in his sleeping bag and gasping for breath that he should have had, Sokka had just foregone the whole attempting process and left his tent. No, after a night like that, the most soothing place for him would be out by the edge of the forest where he would have good view of the moon.

So that's where he went. The trouble was, when he got there, the moon wasn't around. What was around, however, was a trembling, shaking Suki. She looked frail, a word never before uttered even in his mind in the same sentence as her name, as though the wind itself would knock her down if it blew too hard.

And, judging from the bags under her blood-shot eyes, Sokka could tell that he was not the only one having a sleep-less night.

"Suki?" His voice had an odd waver to it, he thought to himself later; after it was all over and they were both in their seperate tents finally getting to sleep just in time for the sun to wake them up for the next day. It was careful, cautious, and at the same time, demanding of an answer. An explanation.

And when his strong, brave, warrior girl turned to him, his heart broke just a little bit more. The fiesty woman that he had come to know and love, not truely but enough to be called 'love', was no where to be seen. Instead, he saw a pale, broken doll who looked like she wanted nothing more than to return to her home island of Kyoshi and never again leave it's shores.

"Suki?" He repeated, voice louder than, as though raising it would shatter the broken girl he was looking at and give him back his warrior girl. But it didn't. If anything, it looked like she was shattering more.

Scrubbing at her eyes with one arm, her light green night-gown billowing around her, Suki turned her gaze away from him. And when she spoke, it was the voice of a scared child he heard and not the one he was used to.

"I...I dreamt..." Her voice broke then, shaky and uneven, and her eyes fluttered close as her sentence peetered away. But one hand had moved to clutch her left shoulder, fingers digging into the burn mark that the green cloth was hiding, and Sokka knew what her nightmare had been about.

It had been about sneering men and a laughing woman, cackeling as they told her no one was coming to save her. Jeering at her. Threatening her. About iron bars that she couldn't break through, a heat caused haze that never went away, and being forced to work until the skin on her hands blistered and popped. About a time when she thought she would die and when everyone else thought that she was already dead.

Swallowing a lump in his throat, Sokka pushed his own nightmares, his own awful memories turned dreams turned panic filled nights, to the back of his mind. In just a few steps, he was standing by the quivering girls side and in just a few seconds, he had wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close to him.

The shattered warrior girl balled her hands into the black shirt that he wore at night, matching the black pants he wore instead of actual night clothes, her forehead moved to rest on the spot between his shoulder and the base of his neck. He could feel her tears, warm in the night air, soaking into his skin; her whole body shaking against his as she cried out all the tears that had been held in during that awful time.

And in a voice that he was beginning to use more and more, Sokka told her the first and only thing to come to his mind. "It's okay now, Suki. It's okay. I promise, I will never let them take you again. Ever."

Another small line was added to his forehead, another small piece of his heart and his soul and his life devoted into protecting someone that wasn't himself. And when battle came, it was just another person's safety that weighted heavily on his mind.