pslplz | Winter Is Coming

Ouka's arms cross, "Don't ask such st--"

"I got this," Sokka interjected, smoother than fresh snow. "I believe the answer is water, the best one; earth, the other best one; air, or at this point I guess it's just rare; aaaaaand, you know, fire."

Sokka didn't have a joke for that one. Sure, Aang had talked about the dragons and their warm colors, and he'd developed a taste for the homey tea Zuko brewed over his own fires.

But comedy, good jokes, worked off information the audience had-- tweaked something hidden in the back of their brains that made so much sense that they doubled over laughing, unable to help it, and Ouka and Omi lacked this most crucial context.

"And, of course, clever benders have master various sub-elements of these essential elements," he adds, seeing Ouka opening her mouth. "Though certainly, there are some things that you benders are just powerless against, like the rest of us. Wood comes to mind, but the classical example, the big one, the one of which all weapons are thusly made is--"

He cedes the spotlight to Toph, with a grin roughly the same size and shape as his boomerang.

Omi wishes he could have caught Ouka before she started them down this path. Her unwitting rudeness was bad enough. Sokka and his friend backtracking for a drawn-out layup was even worse. Ouka wasn't lost and didn't need this any more than he did; she just had a tendency to look too hard for hairs to split. The point was now so belabored as to beg inducing.

Maybe he can still salvage this.

"--Metal," he finishes for them, and plasters a big smile on his face. "That's incredible! You really learned to bend metal? How?"

After a beat of silence, Toph grins.

"That's my secret for now. Maybe after I'm world-famous I'll share. But! I can give a demonstration-- assuming you have something metal on you, of course. Preferably something you don't mind getting destroyed."

"Ah... That's okay. We believe you!" Please don't contradict him, Ouka.

Please?

Ouka was already reaching into her pocket before Omi could say anything.

"Metalbending really is impossible, you're not going to make me believe some random little girl from nowhere," at least, nowhere Ouka has heard of, "really managed to figure out something no one's been able to do for all of history?"

She produced a silver bangle her father had given her. It was a little too big for her wrist, so she'd carry it in her pocket if nobody needed to actually see her wearing it, and her confidence in Toph's ridiculousness meant she had no fear of it being ruined.

Besides, if she asked for another one, he'd give it to her.

Sokka, to whom silver was not a replaceable commodity, tried not to sigh. He couldn't get a hold of Katara when she was on a tear, and he doubted Omi had better luck with a cousin and fiancee rather than an annoying little sister.

He put a hand over the one Toph had on him, and squeezed.

"Let's nobody embarrass ourselves," he suggested lightly, hoping Toph would heed the request not to embarrass Ouka too much.

Though Ouka was presumably new to combat-focused waterbending, and though Sokka thought Toph was an excellent choice for someone to teach her a thing or two about the assumptions sheltered kids could make, it was Omi who'd get stuck with the brunt of the backlash.

Toph understands Sokka loud and clear. There's just one problem: he's being way too subtle for Little Miss Can't-Be-Wrong over there. She just said it herself: there's no way they'd make her believe it was true. If they backed down, she was going to crow. Loudly. And she'd take it as Sokka trying to backpedal from a called bluff instead of trying to save her from her own closed mind.

Toph is not down for being accused of lying about her talents and just letting it slide. No. Way.

Still, Ouka's entitled to a chance at the out, so Toph responds with a shrug, as though it doesn't matter to her one way or the other. "Hey, fine by me. I'm not out to embarrass anyone who isn't asking for it."

"Ouka," Omi coaxes, taking her bangle-bearing hand and trying to nudge it back to her pocket, "Just let it be-- let's show them all we've accomplished while they were off saving the world!"

Edited 2020-02-18 22:35 (UTC)

No, not when they think Ouka is stupid. As if metal can really be bent!

"Only firebenders should be able to bend metal, or forgers, it's always been like that," she said stubbornly. "Only fire is powerful and terrible enough to do it."

She yanks her arm back from Omi and offers it to Toph.

"It's just an old thing Dad gave me a few years ago," she added. "Nobody'll miss it."

Called it.

The corner of Toph's lip turns up in a smirk. She holds out her hand at the verbal cue there's something being offered to her, though she's a little dismayed when she actually feels what she's been handed. It's so tiny! Is that it? Can't she have something like a weapon at least?!

"Well... this is pretty light, but I guess it'll work."

It happens like one, two, three. She twists the bangle from a circle to a figure 8. She mashes the outer ends in towards the center, forming two heart shapes joined at the tip. She bends the two halves 3/4ths together, and hands back to Ouka what now looks more like a pair of butterfly wings.

"Oh you just did that with your hands," Ouka says back, angrier than she thought she'd be. She shoves the twisted metal back in her pocket. "I'll hammer it out myself tonight, and nobody'll ever be able to tell the difference."

Were you not...? Sokka thinks. Who is the blind one here? It's not his girl, his bro, the one and the only. His palm connects with his forehead as he realizes exactly what he's about to do, but as he scrubs it down his face, he just feels... whatever. Aang and Katara brought Zuko down on them by doing what he's already planning to do, but as the cogs turn, he figures, you know what? Zuko ended up being a net positive in the long, long, long run. There's no one to signal if another flare goes off anymore.

Plus, it's symbolic or something. A new skill forged in the crucible of the war, destroying (or at least poetically damaging) the scar on his peoples' psyche that always brought it most brutally home?

Hama's handiwork?

Yeah.

"I got something heavier," said Sokka, so unable to stop himself that he's honestly trying to find reasons this is a good idea still. It'll help Zuko, won't it, to not have it in the back of his mind?

Omi's hand rises to cover his face as Ouka writes off the utter mutilation of her bracelet as not even being proof. Toph, meanwhile, can't even find it in her to be angry-- the reaction is too delightfully absurd. She grins wider.

"If I didn't use bending to change its shape then why do you need a hammer? Just straighten it back out here and now," she challenges.

"Jeez, both of you cool it down, will you?" Omi moans. That's about when Sokka cuts in with the best news Toph's heard all day.

"You do?" She asks with dangerous eagerness. "All right!" Honestly, anything that she could bend to ground her to the world again would be welcome.

Sokka doesn't give Ouka a chance to answer, and thereby prevents Omi from trying to stop her. Them's the breaks.

He keeps a hand light on Toph's upper arm and starts to walk.

"We've got some housecleaning for you to do," he says brightly. "Only it's bigger than a house."

His life has been saved by metalbending before, and he's not about to see it disrespected.

His words come out formed by his vicious resigned grin.

"But in order to do this, we're going to have to break Gran-Gran's number one rule. We're going to have to do something against all the known rules."

Toph stops and folds her arms with a disapproving face, shaking her head.

"Sokka, I'm very disappointed in you... Something against all the known rules?"

"Y-yeah... Sokka, maybe we--" Omi doesn't get the chance to finish. Toph breaks into a grin and cuts him off.

"You should've said so sooner! I've been here ten whole minutes."

Omi, now detecting danger in the form of Toph becoming a very bad influence on a certain cousin, takes Ouka by the shoulders and starts steering her back towards the village gate. Ouka was already unruly when her stubborn side surfaced.

"Ouka, come on, we're going back inside. You said yourself metalbending is impossible, right? There's no point taking this any further. I'll try to fix your bracelet."

"Man, you're really terrible at this lying thing," Toph says, her grin unfazed. "I don't even have my earthbending right now."

Edited 2020-02-22 16:03 (UTC)

Somewhere, somehow, Ouka finds the tact to lower her voice. "You know how over the top Sokka is," she insists, her whisper devolving into a hiss as she goes. "He's probably thinking he has a trick of his own to damage the old ship, and he's going to give it to that little girl because she's blind and he feels sorry for her, but things like that always blow up right in his face!"

"Did I not mention she can detect lies?" Sokka asks, hype-man instinct firmly back in place. "Toph's kind of amazing like that. We seriously would not have made it out of the Fire Nation capital alive if it wasn't for her. We probably would not have made it in."

He can see Ouka's excitement heat up as he throws that out. Like a tiger-shark smelling a cloud of blood, she can't think of anything else except getting what she wants.

"Omi, I'm going, with or without you," she declares.

Sometimes, Omi wonders how life manages to go the way it does. How he ended up with a cousin that felt more like an uncontrollable little sister than a fiancée. How said cousin turned out to be so stubborn and easily baited. How nothing could ever be easy when she was involved.

Sometimes, he wonders how much easier life might be if he just didn't care about her so much.

But he does care. She's annoying and bullish and hot-tempered and shortsighted, and he can't imagine not having her around all the time. Deep down, he doesn't want to imagine it, and he doesn't like the idea of her going somewhere dangerous like an abandoned Fire Nation ship without being there himself, if only for peace of mind.

He sighs.

"You're not going without me," he says.

"Then we're going," Sokka said, trying to keep all the feral teeth out of his tone.

For Toph's benefit, he explained on the way. "You remember Hama, right? Well, one of the raids she talked about ended with the waterbenders freezing a Fire Navy ship in ice. It's been just over the horizon for as long as I can remember, and it's all our nightmares wrapped up into one convenient symbolic symbol of..."

Oh, the word fails.

"Everything we've lost," and he's glad Zuko isn't here to look down, or Katara to look fierce, or Aang to look off into the middle distance. Right now, he's the only one who's got this particular baggage, and that much he can shoulder.

"It's been forbidden for anyone of our Tribe to go near it ever since, so you know it was the first thing Aang and Katara did together."

"You're not going without me," Omi says.

Toph thinks of Sokka then. That polluted Fire Nation village on the river with the crazy guy who had two imaginary brothers, and Katara faking Appa's illness to try to help them.

"NO. I will never ever turn my back on people who need me. I'm going down to the village, and I am going to do whatever I can."

"Wait... I'm coming, too."

"I thought you didn't want to help."

"You need me... and I will never turn my back on you."

It feels like something similar playing out here, only instead of a sister who refuses to walk away from people in need, it's a sister-- cousin-- who refuses to walk away from a threat to her ego. And one who apparently thinks little of Sokka himself, a fact that makes Toph angry inside (yes, she heard that lowered voice just fine, thank you).

She keeps quiet for Omi's sake, not least of which because the knowledge these two are engaged has started giving her an uncomfortable feeling she isn't sure she can articulate. Instead, she joins Sokka moving towards this 'housecleaning' project, getting more context as they walk.

Toph tries to process what it had to be like growing up, always having a monument to the Fire Nation's destruction of your people practically in your back yard. And what it might mean now that the war is over, and Sokka and Zuko and Aang and Katara are all trying to rebuild those burned bridges. Probably a memory best buried.

"What, Miss Stickler-For-The-Rules? That's rich!" In a funny way, of course. Katara proved long ago that even if she's more uptight than the rest of them, she's still fun in her own way. It's an irony that Toph doesn't plan to let go without at least a little teasing, though, next time she sees the girl.

"So, housecleaning. I think I can help you here. Might take a few days, of course. A ship is a lot to take apart."

She's only a stickler for her own rules, Sokka doesn't say. "I blame Aang. You know what a bad influence he can be."

The black mass began to take shape on the horizon line, and Sokka grew quieter as it approached. But it was only a ghost. A lot of bad memories given physical form, and how rich it was that this represented one of the vanishingly few, increasingly insubstantial victories their people eked out over the course of that one long century.

He stopped, and stopped Toph, a few yards from the threshold.

"I still am contractually obligated to advise caution going in," he began. "When Katara and Aang went in, they set off a flare that ended with boomerang and Zuko's skull saying how-do-you-do, so not a total loss, but still a bigger hassle than I want to put up with right now."

Toph is taken off-guard when that hand blocks her from moving forward.

"Sokka," she says with a shake of her head, the 'tsk' sound almost literally audible in her tone. "You say that like I won't be able to see literally everything in there."

"He was talking to us," Omi clarifies.

"Oh... Well, that makes a lot more sense."

Sokka grinned, anticipating something really impressive.

"Hey, I know what you're capable of," he said.

Ouka, who could recognize that they were taking this impressively far, crossed her arms.

"If you're trying to scare us off--"

"I am really not," Sokka interrupted her. "Just... go wild already, okay?" He raised an arm, then dropped it, like he was starting a race.

"And don't make me regret the 'wild' part..."

"Heh heh," Toph chuckles quietly, in a way that must sound very menacing if you happened to be a piece of metal.

She takes a few more steps and feels her toe bump up against something hard. She pulls off her glove and stretches her out her hand, but all she feels is--

"Hey, Sokka... Where's the entrance to it?"

Because she knows what she's feeling right now is just ice, and from the feel of it, it goes up a ways.

"Give me a minute," Omi says. He scans the exterior, then steps forward and raises both his arms. From the mass of ice supporting the ship, two ridges about three feet apart rise and refreeze, spanning from the ground up to a hole in the ship's side. He then bends a makeshift staircase in the space between. It isn't his prettiest work, but it will do. It's more important that the steps are consistent.

"Try that. The stairs are just to your right-- there's a railing on either side."

Toph fumbles a bit with her hand still out until she finds the railing. It's only a moment longer to find the stairs themselves. She feels her way up the first, then the second. Then she smiles.

"Thanks, this will work nicely. Ouka, follow me please."

She huffs and she puffs, but this has been going on long enough that something had better happen. And she does want the best seats...

Probably an upside of being blind is that you can't see the look on people's faces as you talk to them, and so it's harder to doubt yourself. Ouka has to always just double down, push forward, and damn the consequences. So she follows.

Below, Sokka lowers his voice-- enough to foil Ouka, but not Toph.

"She's not going to do anything permanent to your fiancee," Sokka whispered to his friend.

For Omi, reassurance; for Toph... the most gentle of reminders!

Toph knows Ouka must be following because she can hear the crunch of snow and ice crystals behind her, the scrape of another mitten on the railing that Omi helpfully added.

She also hears Sokka's reassurance, and Omi's response which, from the sound of it, seems like Sokka's words may have had the opposite intended effect.

"That doesn't make me feel better." Well.

"Hey," Toph says loudly enough for the boys to hear. "Relax, will you? We're just going up to have a chat. Girl talk. You boys can join in a minute."

Ship-trashing will happen and in good time, but first things first: Real Talk with the judgy girl, because you don't talk that way about Toph's friends. Especially not Sokka.

Why do the words 'girl talk' will Sokka with existential dread?

Not so Ouka. She does sense something is not right, but can't begin to put the feeling to rights.

"We can talk about whatever you want," she said, her words filtered through a pout. There wasn't even anything worth pouting about, except that she had no idea what was going to happen, now.

"I know we can. That's the nice part about both of us being the completely honest type." Toph feels the texture under her boots change into something less slick and knows they've made it to the ship. Finally!

Placing her bare hand on the side, she pauses there and spends a few seconds in silence.

"It's fine in this room, but we're not going to go wandering any further. There are a few booby traps I need to take care of first. Step on in."

That's just a good guess, right? The obvious conclusion, of course the enemy ship is booby-trapped; she remembers Katara's and Sokka's stories.

"So what do you want me to be honest about?" she asks. This is not the expected turn, and wasn't Toph supposed to be the one proving things...?

Once she's on sweet, solid metal, Toph yanks off her shoes and MAN that floor is cold but she refuses to put her boots back on already. Looking, looking-- aha.

"First off, let's get rid of this draft."

She runs to the weapons mount on the wall and peels the six-foot square off the wall like it's an old poster. A spin and violent shove, and the slab flies across the room to patch the entrance, denting the frame around it with its overlap.

Does she have your attention now?

Winter Is Coming

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