Aang dreamt heavily that night. It started out pretty normally, just him in a forest, meditating. He recognized it was a dream right away though, something about how the trees were moving in different directions, like the wind was coming from different places. So he kept sitting, just staring at the scenery. Wind and trees and leaves and breeze and a nice sun. Then, some laughter. He whipped his head around to see a flash of white heading behind a tree.

"Hey, who are you? What's going on?"

The laughter started again, and Aang ran to where he last saw movement. There was nothing there, and the sounds had abruptly shifted to behind him. He turned, and it was still behind him.

"If you're a spirit or something, you legally have to tell me if I ask you . . . Are you a spirit?" Aang didn't think this would work, but why not try? It's not like anything else would work in a dream. The laughter was getting louder and louder, until a little girl stepped out from behind the same tree Aang had run all around. Aang recognized her instantly. "Toph?"

"You remembered me? Finally."

This wasn't a spirit dream, this wasn't even like a prophetic dream or anything, this was just a normal dream. This was worse, normal dreams didn't follow the rules.

"Of course I remembered you, I never forgot you, I just . . . it was hard . . . I couldn't."

Toph was older now, her voice had deepened a bit. "You never visited, you never wrote-"

"You can't read-?"

"I WOULD HAVE HAD PEOPLE READ TO ME!" Toph had aged up, she was older than Aang now.

"I'm sorry, I just . . . I won't forget about you again."

Toph's hair grew longer, and lines began to grow on her face. "You won't? Just like you said you wouldn't when you moved to the South Pole? Just like you said whenever you went off with Zuko and never brought me?"

Aang couldn't tell if Toph was still growing or if he was shrinking, but he felt like the smallest person ever. "I didn't forget you then, I'm sorry, just-" Aang realized he wasn't shrinking, he was just slowly shrinking into quicksand.

Toph's hair was greying now, and she began to hunch over, bending to stare at Aang who was looking up. "You didn't forget!? You're forgetting right now!"

"What!"

"WAKE UP TWINKLETOES, YOU'RE MISSING BREAKFAST!"

Aang woke up to the accusing face of Toph looming over him as he sunk slowly into some quicksand of Toph's creation. Azula stood behind, covering her face to hide her laughter. Aang mustered up a smile. "Good . . . morning?"

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Breakfast was worse than expected. They all sat along a giant round table, Aang was between Zuko and Azula, and directly facing Toph, who kept kicking rocks at him. Katara, luckily, wasn't in Aang's line of sight. Everyone was oddly quiet, save Zuko and Mai, who couldn't stop whispering and giggling. Aang didn't know what to pay attention to.

He leaned over to Azula's ear. "I'm just trying to act natural, why's everyone else so quiet?" Azula giggled and whipped her head away.

"Breath, ear, tickles." She moved away a bit, then turned towards him and cupped her hand over his ear. "I think everyone's awkward because I'm here. They still don't really trust me." Azula's face was blank, but there was tension in her body. "You don't though, why is that?"

Aang shooed her off. "I think they're more awkward because of me. They expect things from me, or expected them . . . and they're disappointed. They have no expectations for you, so I think they're kinda impressed. Ow!" Toph had shot another rock at his shins. Aang whipped his head around to stare at her. She waved her hand in front of her face.

"I'm blind, doofus. Eye contact won't work on me!" She blurted out, to a silent table.

Suki, who was sitting right next to her, looked at her strongly. "Are you okay, Toph?" Toph opened her mouth to answer, but Aang had had enough. Her words were interrupted by the clatter of her glass hitting the table and her yelping at the hot tea that was spilled all over her lap. Luckily, all this commotion covered up Aang's gentle wave of his hand which had started it.

"What the hell!?" Toph was busy throwing dirt onto herself to soak up the liquid, which Aang had generously cooled at least a bit. The other breakfasters gave her their full attention.

"Toph, if you need help eating, you can always ask us, you know?" Katara was in mother mode. "We wouldn't think less of you, we know that the table is wood and you can't see too well through that."

Toph turned towards Katara, Aang forgotten. "You know I can do anything you can do, you've seen it before. Look at me eat." Toph lifted a cup of juice to her lips, and Aang saw his chance. He pursed his lips, breathed out a bit and watched Toph's glass tip over just the slightest, spilling red all over her shirt.

"ALRIGHT LITTLE BOY, LET'S TAKE THIS OUTSIDE!" Toph stomped her feet, covering Aang in a stoney shell, then dragged him out of the eating room. They didn't stay outside though, Toph brought him all the way to the room she was staying in. She kept Aang trapped in a pillar in the middle of her room, then began to undress.

"Stop! Stop! Put your clothes back on!" Aang managed to rip his way out of the stone and pin Toph's shirt to her body with ice. This was particularly impressive, as his eyes were closed the entire time.

"You jerk! My shirt's all sticky and it's your fault!" Toph locked Aang up in stone again, only leaving his hands and head free. "Now let me go so I can change!"

"Let me go so I can get out of here and you can change!"

"Maybe, if you weren't so childish, you wouldn't need to go, and you would stay here with me! " Toph was straining against the ice, yelling at Aang with all she had.

"Maybe, I wouldn't have to if you would just let me go, and then we could maybe, I don't know, hang out later!" Aang struggled back, working his hands until he busted out of the stone. He conjured up an air scooter and was about to leave until . . .

"If you don't stay, I'll never talk to you again. Although, I guess that's what you want," she whispered. So Aang didn't leave. His concentration lost, Toph's ice splashed down as water.

"What are you talking about?"

"You're just going to leave again. I fight a war for you and you just leave me with my mom. You pop back in whenever Katara feels like it, and then you stop doing that, and we both know that Katara was only coming back just because she felt bad for me, but you weren't even doing that, were you? You said 'hey, it was nice knowing you to TEACH ME EARTHBENDING and FIGHT MY WAR FOR ME, now I'm just going to wander the world alone.' And what the actual hell, Aang, you never seemed like you cared anything about me at all. So go, leave. I don't even know why I brought you here anymore." Toph sighed, defeated, then turned her back to Aang, who was choking back a bit of a sob. She pulled her shirt off and kept talking, mostly just muttering to herself. "I just thought you might be as broken up about it as I am-as I was. Even though you aren't courting Azula, you've definitely gotten pretty close to her . . . I bet you wouldn't forget to keep in touch with her when you left. I bet you wouldn't leave her."

Aang couldn't move for a couple seconds. He turned his head towards her, and just stood, closed-eyed and open-jawed. Assumptions were made when he imagined meeting up with everyone after all this time. He thought Sokka would have hated him, he thought Katara would have missed him more, but he didn't think that Toph would have cared at all. She, of all people, seemed most likely to come find him whenever she would have wanted to.

"You could have . . . you could have tried to do anything, you know? This one's not all me, right?"

"For what? So you could know that I'm lonely? So you could pity me like everyone else does? Cause I'm what? A little blind girl who can't even feed herself without spilling everything!?" Aang was hit in the face with wet cloth. Toph had pretty good aim. He waited for another couple of seconds, just to see if she was done, the shirt still draped on his face.

"I'm sorry."

"What?"

"I'm sorry?" Aang scratched the back of his head, then wiped his hands on his pants. "I didn't . . . do anything. I guess I didn't want to hurt our relationship the way I did me and Katara's, so I avoided it. That was dumb, cause now you're hurt and my shins are hurt, and you're pretty angry at me. So this is a long time coming, but I'm sorry."

"Yeah, you better be!" Toph punctuated this with a blow from a very small rock. Practically a pebble. "You're a jerk. And an idiot."

"Yeah, a little bit." Aang laughed.

"I haven't forgiven you, idiot, stop laughing" He did. "But I might, later. What are you going to do?"

"Going to do?"

"To make it up to me, what are you going to do? You still know how I always want people to make it up to me, right?" Toph's voice sounded nicer, but Aang probably wasn't safe yet.

"Is it putting on a shirt so I can open my eyes?" The old shirt had fallen from his head, leaving a sticky trail of juice that he really wanted to wash off.

"It's been on for like five minutes, stupid. And you remember what I'm asking for. Just you and me, on a-"

"Fieldtrip!?" Aang managed to remember right in the nick of time, hopefully showing how much he still cared.

"Yeah, so if you really want to make it up to me, we're going on one. Right now."