Don't Look

Summary: Tokka, OneShot. Toph experiences color through an unconventional relationship. Rated M.

Blue eyes.

This is meaningless. She lives inside a shadow like a casket, windowless and cramped. She is stranded in a black tomb. After she's wrapped her legs around his waist, after he's breathed her name into her neck, before the sun dips over the horizon like a bright lemon: 'Tell me what it's like.'

'What what's like?'

'Color.' The wonder in her voice is soft, a milky bud of cotton, the velvet white in a birch leaf. 'Everything about color, Sokka. Please.'

'Color.' He repeats it. He turns the word over in his voice, a breakable object to him. He is at loss for what to say but please flips in his throat before he can think. 'Everything is a different color. Some things are the same color. I don't know. Some colors are nice. People like different colors…'

She has a shallow hiccup threatening to erupt against her teeth. These are the words that are forbidden to her: red, blue, green, white, yellow, orange. This is what she is told she sees: black, black, black. Thick like crude oil, like night. Night is black, morning is white. She is here alone on an island of opposites.

'What color are you?' She has interrupted his meaningless color rant and he stops. He takes a breath, hesitant.

'Um.' He is crouching on top of her, stroking her back with his palms, kneading her muscles between his fingers. Noises make her feel too feminine – too helpless, and it disgusts her endlessly – but she can't help sighing and the moans are quiet and gurgling, little foamy waves. 'I have blue eyes… dark brown hair. My skin is tan, sort of. Three basic colors. And a black dot in the center of each eye. A pupil.' She can tell he is smiling when he says this and she smiles too, cognizant of his hands on her backside, stroking the inside of her thigh. Attentively he makes his way up. It's as if they are meeting for the first time. Hello, I am three basic colors, let me make love to you.

Between shallow breaths: 'What… color… is sex?'

She feels the sticky contact his hips and her thighs. The film of sweat on his chest as it glues to her back, greasy and fractioned, warm as butter. He is swift like a signal, hard – no pleasantries, never any questions. Once he is inside of her he answers quietly, 'Clear. Sometimes it's white. It's pink.' He is moving steadily and she hikes her knees the way she always does, keeping his rhythm. It is so easy, so wet. Suddenly she feels one of his hands over her navel. He follows the line of weightless hair to her pubis; she shivers and her legs shake. 'Black,' he murmurs plainly.

They mix, climax, keep at it for an hour and detach suddenly. He rolls to the edge of the bed – she has warned him that she is sensitive after sex, tender like a new bruise. But this time she pursues him, clings to his shoulders and kisses his chin, then finds his mouth with her tongue, strangely eager. There is a delicacy and dependency in this and he sighs in bliss. I can't find your mouth, she seems to say, but when I find it I will kiss it until we both sleep.

Brown earth.

They are muck. He is unreliable, goofy – she is cruel, punishing. They rarely argue as a team – instead she screams, he apologizes, and they find their bases in bed. It is a simple piece of clockwork that ticks intrinsically. She can't help loving him, wanting him. He can't help wanting her, loving her. They are young, early twenties, still fumbling but solid enough to build castles in the dirt.

He thinks fondly, if it lasts long enough, she will know every color to everything. He will teach her. And then he finds himself noticing the subtle differences in color – the way certain greens reflect light differently – the way you can almost tell the color of a leaf from how it feels, whether it is slick or oily, or fuzzy with little organic hairs. It makes him think about what color is and how to find it, how to dissect it like a finely tuned machine, how to present it to her in a way she can understand.

'Think about sand,' he whispers. He is sitting on the edge of the mattress; she is giving him brief kisses, barely brushing her lips against his stomach. The tension makes him rise – he feels the blood rush up and focusing becomes tedious.

'Sand,' she repeats, her mouth moving against his tip. She hears the groan he tries to silence in his belly. 'Sand is yellow.'

'But some sand is orange and white, and some sand is volcanic – and that kind of sand is black.' He is quiet when he feels the contact of her cheeks, the flap at the back of her throat, her tongue – wet, muscular. He breathes in sharply, grabs her hair with his hands and throws his head back. He feels weak and grateful – the conflict excites him and he wants this to go on forever, colors and sex, sex and colors.

White clouds.

She spreads herself out on her back, facing the ceiling. He returns the favor eagerly and she thinks: breathe, breathe, breathe. She can't handle his tongue, his mouth, his teeth. He knows how to undo her when he does this and she can't help it – she screams into her hands over and over.

'Lungs!' she exclaims, blushing, trying to remember to fill them with air. 'What color are lungs?'

'Pink. If you smoke, they turn black.' He brings her to her highest point – her back arches and she cries out again. He loves the noises, the sound, the rugged mildness of her voice. He wishes she would be more open with moaning and sighing but he already knows the response if he were to ask. She would see no reason to express that weakness, that falling – she wouldn't want him to know how deep he pulls her, layer after layer, even further into her tomb.

Afterwards, she kisses him and holds him against her, suddenly frightened to let go, and thinks aloud, 'Everything has a little bit of black. Doesn't it?' She pauses. 'Pupil. Sand. Lungs. Me.' His only thought is that she is right – she is always right – and he wants to tell her that despite her hair and her pupils and the dark tomb she lives in, there is no black in her at all. She is water, colorless and fluid, moving through him and his bones, so deep and terrible that it shakes him when he thinks about ever misplacing her on this earth.

'Maybe. Maybe everything has some black,' he says. 'But unless I am looking to remember it for you, I never think to look.'