#100. Foundation

I really wonder who came up with some of these prompts...

So the background: this takes place right after the episode where Azula and co. chase the Gaang and don't let them sleep for a few days, and Toph and Katara catfight, and then it all gets resolved somehow and they take naps. More or less. Point is, Toph and Sokka don't really know each other yet.

Disclaimer: Don't own A:tLA.

He never fell asleep quickly, contrary to popular belief. He liked sleeping, and hated waking up, but he was awake later than the other two more often than not. It was hard to stop feeling like he should be watching out for Katara and Aang, and sometimes he thought that it was easiest to do that when they were asleep. It wasn't easy to compete with them in fighting, but this was a little way for him to watch out for them, do the whole big-brother thing. Of course, they told him to get over himself, but it made him feel better to lie awake a little while in his sleeping bag, just until Aang and Katara fell quiet. It had nothing to do with sleeping outside or new bruises or being hungry, most of the time—just that this felt like making a difference.

Now, it wasn't that he mistrusted this new addition to the group. He got, of course, that she could kick his ass in theory, but she was still a little girl. There was a limit, he felt, to how scared he could really be of her.

He didn't know her very well yet.

Really, he wasn't paying her much attention; he hadn't so far. There seemed little to know. She was a brilliant bender, and she was loud but standoffish, and she was blind so he was certainly going to say something stupid and insensitive to her at some point. Likely, many somethings. These were the things he knew about her.

He didn't yet know she had nightmares.

He heard her shifting in her sleep, and then a hitch in her breathing, giving way to a strange, snuffling sound. She still slept in a rock lean-to, a few yards from the rest of them, and it made it almost impossible to tell if she was asleep or not. Sokka paused, not sure if this was the part where he spoke or shut up, as he heard the scrape of blankets against the dirt. A moment later, Toph poked her head out of the tent. She looked paler than usual, and was dragging a thin, ratty blanket behind her. He cleared his throat.

"Toph?"

She yelped and clutched at the blanket, and he sat up quickly. "Me," he blurted. "Just me. Sokka. It's okay."

"Right. Yeah." She pressed a hand against her mouth, her cheeks slightly red. It might have just been the firelight. "Course. Sorry if I woke you or something."

"I was still awake." He wriggled out of his sleeping bag, clambering to his feet. "You okay?"

"Fine." She ducked her head a little, swiping at her eyes. Those looked reddish too, and Sokka didn't think that was a trick of the light. "Just… having trouble sleeping."

"How come?"

"Nothing. I just can't." Toph dropped down onto the ground by the fire, folding her feet under the blanket. The fire had decayed to embers, moldering red under the ashes. She held out her hands for warmth, reaching awkwardly forward in the general direction of the fire pit. "Is the fire still there?" she asked, after a moment, and he got it.

"It's burnt down. There's not much left."

"Damn," she said, and drew her hands back, reaching for the blanket. Sokka frowned.

"So you can't see...?"

"Fire. No. It doesn't give off vibrations, right?" Sokka nodded quickly and then broke off, shaking his head. She sighed in a pained sort of way. "I see, just not with my 's not that complicated."

"Right," he muttered—which meant, yes it is, and I'm not going to get it—and shuffled over, taking a seat a couple feet away from her. "As long as I don't have to help you cross the road or something."

"I'll hit you if you try."

From what little of her he'd seen already, he still knew she meant it. "Got it. No helping." He paused, leaning back on his hands. "So, you gonna tell me what's wrong?"

"No."

"Homesick?" he prodded, pretending not to have heard. "Miss the family? Or just sleeping in a real bed?" Her face folded into a scowl. "Okay, no. Afraid of the woods at night? Scared of the… no," he amended quickly, "probably not scared of the dark, right?"

She nearly smiled, and he took it as encouragement. "Come on," he wheedled. "Everyone has bad dreams sometimes. What's up?"

Toph's hands tightened on the blanket, stretching it her shoulders. Curled up, she was smaller than Sokka had thought when he first saw her—or maybe he'd never really looked at her carefully before. It was much easier to see the Blind Bandit, less so the Bei Fong heiress. Spirits, he thought with surprise, she'd probably never been camping in her life.

He looked closer. Her eyes were still rimmed red, and the circles under them from days without sleep seemed even darker at night. Her hair was unkempt, stray clumps falling lopsided across her face. The bun she'd try to put it in was falling apart, and she didn't even seem to know how to tie it back by herself.

"They would have killed us, wouldn't they?"

He started slightly. "What?"

"Those girls. The ones who were chasing us. The creepy one," she added, and Sokka remembered the gray, narrowed eyes, the two fingers brandished like a knife, the girl with lightning at her fingertips. Azula was his age, Sokka thought, certainly no older, but the look in her eyes hadn't been a kid's. "She would have killed us," Toph persisted. "Wouldn't she?"

He stared at her. Her face was downturned, and as he watched she scuffed her feet against the dirt. She looked too sorry to lie to, and too little to hear the truth.

"Probably," he said, and then, "yes. Well… yes."

"Does that scare you?"

He laughed weakly, because some things you had to laugh at. "Shitless."

"So… what do you do?"

That was a stupid question. Neither of them knew until later how stupid it had been. You couldn't do anything, after a point. You carried on; you stayed alive. You didn't think too hard about any of it. You had bad dreams sometimes, and they made you remember you'd been scared, and you went and sat by the fire to remind yourself that there were still warm places and blankets and quiet left, enough to get by on.

"You keep going," he replied, and it was the best he could do. "It isn't scary after a while."

"I can tell that you're lying."

Ah. That. Damn. "Fine," he snapped. "It's never not scary. Did you think it would be fun?" His eyes narrowed. "Would you rather go home, or what? Say so, if you do."

"Don't be stupid," she growled. "I can't."

"Don't be stuck-up," he shot back. "You might be good, but you're not the only earthbender in the Nation."

Her hands balled into fists on the blanket; her face tightened. "I'm not stuck-up," she retorted. "No other earthbender can do what I can. But that's not what I'm talking about." She wasn't loud at all, her voice a soft hiss against the occasional crackle of embers, but it carried straight through the dark. "There are Fire Nation people following us, and they know we came from Gaoling. If I go back, the whole town's in danger." She leaned closer to the dying fire; in the dim orange light, he saw her lip curl. "I'm not here for Twinkletoes. What I've seen, I don't even know if that kid can fight a Fire Lord. I just couldn't go back if I wanted."

"You want to?"

She paused, and the sneer on her lips grew more defined. "Spirits, no," she huffed, and her mouth twisted into what could, with some poetic license, almost be called a smile. Back then, Sokka could count the grins he'd seen from her on one hand, but none of them had looked quite so daunting, or so real, as this one. "You couldn't get me back in Gaoling if you paid me."

On a Wednesday a few weeks after Sozin's comet, riding with an honor guard that Zuko had commissioned her, she returned to Gaoling. When she arrived at her parents' house, she was invited inside and, stepping through the large door, burst abruptly into tears. The incident was never again mentioned by any of the witnesses, not even Sokka.

But that was years away, and for now he chuckled softly. "You're full of shit," he said, and so far, it was his most accurate assessment of her. She snorted and stood up, drawing the blanket closer.

"Whatever," she replied. "I'm going to bed."

"Try not to get too scared," he called, without looking back at her. "I'd like to get some sleep."

From within her tent, he heard a laugh. "Try not to snore too much—so would I."

He grumbled a retort under his breath, kicking dirt on the embers as he stood up and trying not to smile, and went back to his sleeping mat. He waited, then, and only when her breathing settled into a slow, steady rhythm did he allow himself to fall asleep.

Seventy-seven down, twenty-three to go ^_^ Have a good last few days of 2011!