Wow, that was a much, much longer hiatus than planned. Sorry for the wait - I really, really hope this chapter at least partially makes up for how very encouraging, enthusiastic and patient the reviewers have been. Thanks, guys - I really appreciate it.
I was going to write this from Sokka's viewpoint, but... so far, it's all been Toph's viewpoint, and I kinda want to stick with it, maybe run a little further with Toph's headvoice. Plus it's a bit more dramatic this way, I think, and you should know by now I like misery and dramaaaa. XD
Sokka is dreaming again. Toph can sense him dreaming from quite a distance away; from the sheer amount of disturbance he's creating as he rolls around in his sleep, this isn't a happy, cloudy kind of dream, but something far more... visceral, yet Sokka himself is oddly silent. There's no crying out in his sleep, no screams, and the lack of noise is, for lack of a better word, creepy. She sighs, both for her own lack of sleep and because she does actually care. A little, tiny bit, under many layers of cynicism and general apathy with the world, or so she tries to fool herself.
To prove how little she actually cares, she rolls over and tries to go back to sleep, but, well, all the tiny vibrations in the earth just won't let her. Obviously, the only solution towards getting any sleep at all tonight is to make Sokka stop dreaming. And it isn't at all because it doesn't sound like the sort of nightmare a teenage boy should be capable of having, it's just so she can close her eyes and get some sleep. Any other reason would mean that Toph is getting soft, and Toph does not do nice, she tells herself in her head.
So she stands up and wanders over to the sleeping Sokka, and it's a measure of how far his nightmare has dragged him down and trapped him in his own personal hell that he doesn't even wake up until she's leaning over him, debating whether to shake him or just yell at him and maybe wake up Aang and Katara too.
When he wakes up, though, he wakes up in a hurry. Toph barely has time to put an arm between her face and Sokka's fist, as the nightmare blends with reality and he sees an enemy looming above him for a brief moment and tries, desperately, to fight it off in the second between the body waking up and the mind following.
When he does realise that it's not, in fact, whatever horror his dream produced, but a real, very irate Toph he's just hit, the look of sheer guilt (and maybe a little fear; Toph is scary when she's angry) on his face shouldn't actually be possible for one person, but Sokka manages it. Toph gives him a slightly pained expression, and then gestures, away from the sleeping people, towards the edge of tonight's clearing.
Before she can even start to talk, Sokka is mumbling some kind of apology; Toph gives it a couple of seconds, but he's not explaining. He's just using the same basic apology over and over again in slightly different phrasing each time. Toph waits for him to run out of ways to say he didn't mean to hit her, and then informs him that really, it's not like he could ever hurt her, so all this apologising is quite unnecessary. It's a bit of a lie; her arm genuinely does hurt, but not in a way that suggests any long-lasting damage, so it's only half the truth, right? And his shaking and guilty twitching slows down a little, too, so she reckons it probably helped, just a little. He's not looking in her direction, though, so she orders him to start walking and indicates a way through the trees around them. Maybe a little exhaustion will get it out of his system.
An hour later, it seems to have worked. Sokka is noticeably less shaken, as he usually is after these walks. It doesn't feel like the sun's risen yet because Toph can't feel its heat on her skin; the birds, however, have started to squawk, which suggests that it's probably just starting to get lighter, and light of any kind seems to calm Sokka down too. On the other hand, Toph is only a little calmer, but a lot more tired, and pretty much ready to pass out.
They stop, just under the trees surrounding the campsite. Toph's expecting the usual complete silence, so it's a bit of a surprise when instead, Sokka tells her what he dreamt last night, in one long monotone sentence. About the darkness in his dreams, how even though he couldn't see or hear anyone he knew he wasn't alone. About how he knew it couldn't be Aang or Katara or Toph because in the dream, he knew they wouldn't come for him. About how the wall collapsed in around him and a shape that looked like Toph but smiled like a hungry predator laughed as the walls bent themselves around him, trapping him in the dark, unable to move or scream as the figue got closer and closer and closer. About how when he woke up and Toph was leaning over him he thought he was still dreaming.
And then he thanks her. For being there, he says, without being too much there.
This is entirely enough sentiment (if understandable; Katara's been hanging over him pretty much constantly all day every day for the last few weeks) for Toph, so she hits him gently, and suggests that if he is that grateful, maybe he can let her get some sleep now? She smiles, to soften the sentence. She thinks, maybe, just maybe, he starts to smile back a little, before he walks away without another word.
And if the sleep they both get isn't very long, it seems to be peaceful for both of them.