Chapter Nine: Lost
Toph still feels numb and heavy when she comes to.
Her limbs, which for so long have been her eyes and weapons, have failed her. No, that isn't it—they've been taken from her, forcefully. She has no way to fight back against that kind of power. It isn't like she can see the monster, and even if she could, it wouldn't help. He'd controlled the entire room with his hands bound.
She stays limp for a few minutes, then curls into a ball, covering her head with her hands. Her pride rails at her, tells her that she is forty and too old to be acting like this, but her fear coils around her and holds her fast. This has never happened to her before.
Well, once.
She's been suspended in midair before, held miles above the hottest flame she's ever felt, but then she'd had an anchor, someone holding onto her as her muscles seized up and telling her in a no-frills way that this was it.
Her body tingles unpleasantly with the combined memory and sensation returning as her circulation gets back up to speed. Slowly her "sight" returns, her cheek pressed reassuringly against the stone floor, but still she doesn't move. She hears the tentative voices of her stirring officers, but doesn't loosen until she senses a gait she is well-trained in noticing by now.
Sokka gently hauls her up, brushing hair back and asking her if she's alright. She nods dumbly, and with his wobbly assistance makes it back to her feet.
The day isn't over. Of course it isn't. There is a statement to prepare and a press conference to attend, not to mention preparation for the newest trial against Yakone the former bloodbender. There is paperwork to file, her officers to re-motivate, and a Council-assigned psychiatrist to fend off (Sokka might've agreed to help with that snag). Finally, exhaustingly, her day ends. Funnily enough, around the same time, so does Councilman Sokka's.
Once upon a time it would have been the greatest of scandals that the Chief of Police and the Head Councilman went home together, but the press had wrung that story dry long ago, almost at the cost of their friendship. Since her unexpected pregnancy and life as a single mother, something had changed between them, something on another level entirely from the camaraderie they were used to. It doesn't have a name. It's just part of who they are now.
Lin is with her Aunt Katara and her kids. As much as Toph wants to see her, she knows that she isn't in the right frame of mind to approach her daughter right now. She's failed Lin, failed everyone. She's underestimated a dangerous criminal, and that mistake has almost cost her both her life and the wellbeing of her city. That kind of failure isn't fit to be the mother of such a strong-willed and talented young lady like Lin.
"Stop," Sokka says sharply, his voice startling Toph from her brooding.
"I'm not doing anything," Toph retorts.
"You're wallowing. It's not healthy." Sokka returns to the table with two small cups and a large bottle in his hand. "It's not your fault, what happened today."
Toph remains silent, her many arguments against that statement roiling in her and clamoring for release. She is contemplating which would best fit her mood when she is interrupted again.
"None of us had any idea what he was capable of. No one blames you, and you shouldn't blame yourself," he says gently. He touches one of her smaller hands with his larger one and knocks back a shot. Toph throws down her own and realizes that they are going to go round and round about this topic for a few weeks and she doesn't feel like arguing her point right now. Sokka being Sokka, he'll pick up on the other thing bothering her fairly quickly.
Neither of them speak until the bottle is half-gone, but Toph doesn't feel drunk, exactly; mostly woozy and grim. Apparently Sokka is the same, because after a moment of hesitation (heart skittering a little, muscles tensing), he takes both of her hands in his.
"He made me watch," he says shortly. "Most everyone in the room could see you, but he made me watch. He turned my head for me when he moved you and wouldn't let me look away when he knocked you out."
She isn't sure what to say to that and stays silent, squeezing his fingers and stroking the back of his thumbs with her own.
"Reminded me of that other time," he grunts. "I don't…I don't like thinking about…"
Toph squeezes her eyes shut and presses her lips to Sokka's hands. They flutter loose from her and cup her face, stroking her cheeks and the sudden wetness.
"As long as I'm able," he murmurs quietly, "I'm…always…gonna be around to protect you."
"Same," she croaks, running her hands up and down Sokka's forearms. "Always. Just the same."
Sokka moves to sit in the chair next to her, then shifts her around so they are touching, forehead to forehead, alcohol-breath mingling and body heat sharing, taking absolute comfort in the fact that they are alive and whole and, for the moment, together. Drops from his eyes soak into her pants and for a moment they simply breathe and cry together (crybabies, her inner mind notes, gently amused more than condemning).
Toph thinks about kissing him again, a real kiss, not the fiasco that happened about ten years ago when they were both so hammered neither of them remembered stumbling home drunk. She touches his scruffy jaw for a moment, thinking. Then he stands up and the thought leaves her.
They've fallen asleep together more times than they care to count over the years, but rarely have they just lain in bed side-by-side, breathing and listening to the silence and pretending to be asleep when they really aren't. Toph outlasts him, but only just; as his steady breathing and heavy warm arm entice her consciousness away she touches his jaw again.
"I love you," she murmurs. With nothing left to offer, she follows him into dreaming.
Or so she thinks; what she doesn't realize is that he's awake, and he heard her. He buries his head in her hair, grown long again, breathing her in as deeply as he can.
"I love you, too," he whispers. But she's snoring, and it almost doesn't seem fair, but in Sokka's heart he knows—with a certainty he reserves for knowing that Yue and Lian both loved him, and that his mother and father loved him, and that Aang and Katara and every close friend he's ever had love him, and that he loves them all fiercely—that with them, time doesn't mean much. One day, and one day soon, they'll both be awake and ready for the kind of sappiness that usually came with that sort of confession.
For tonight, he'll hold her and admire the moonlight on her still-smooth skin.
A/N: This is one of those from Tokka Week that I knew, when I reread it, I needed to expand on, even in this little way. I'm sorry for my wall-of-text ways, but-you know what, no, I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry at all. :) I AM a little bashful at not including Lin in this chapter, since I know she'd be frantic over her mom and uncle's safety, but...this just wasn't the place. Imagine it, if you will, because the next chapter is the last. I'm horrible, I know.