Chapter Text
At some point, you have to give up.
The thought graces Sokka’s mind for a millisecond before his strength resurges to take another step forward. The drag of the harsh winds almost pulls him to his knees again, and he doubles over in a feeble attempt to steady himself. Distantly, he can almost hear the dramatic narration about ‘biting winds’ from a play he’d seen at a theatre that his sister had dragged him into at their last stop. The turn of phrase that had seemed so laughably cliche at the time was now being proven tragically accurate: he bitterly licks his lips to soothe the sting.
Gods, he thinks. Katara.
The image of her face lurches unwelcome in his mind and sobers him against the almost drunken hysteria that he felt mounting - he takes another step forward. Her soft smile as she stirs a pot of soup - another step. Her tired yet proud eyes as she practices her water whip with a newfound ease - another step. Her mischievous smile as she warms up to Aang’s newest plan to ride something that should never be approached without a death wish - that one earns two. The raw fear that mirrored his own as she was dragged away—
Nope. Nope. Not happening, not now, not ever.
Sokka takes another ragged breath and squints up against the horizon. Barely flickering through the gloom of the storm is the light he had seen earlier from the top of the mountain. What had appeared the merry twinkling of the hundred harbour lights of a port town in the icy dusk before the storm could now well be mistaken for a single house or - he bites his lip at the chilling thought - a trick of the imagination. Still, he presses on with the confidence, or perhaps hope, that he remains on course.
Minutes. Hours. Days? The thought of a storm so strong that the sky turns dark for a week makes him huff a laugh before he grimaces at the seemingly never-ending stretch between him and this barely-there glimmer.
You should shut your mouth before the spirits hear you and get ideas.
“The spirits,” he argues back miserably, “have better things to do than torment me. So why don’t you shut your mouth?”
I’m literally you.
“Well, I’m literally me and I—”. He breaks off bashfully.
Oh spirits, I’m talking to myself.
Sokka scrubs a gloved hand over his face as if it could erase the embarrassment of his apparent newly-garnered insanity. He will walk silently and there will be no more arguing with himself like some sort of crazy person, so that when he reaches the harbour and asks for help, the spritely townspeople (in his visions, all young women) will all gladly welcome him into their warm arms and feed him by the fire and all will be well. He shakes his head and turns back towards the glint in the distance.
Or rather, where the glint would be, if there was a glint at all.
Oh no. Oh no. He’s not sure if it’s the panic or the wind that sends him to his knees this time.
When Sokka wakes up, he’s delighted to find he can feel all ten of his toes once more. Even, he finds with relief, his small toe on the right foot that had been the first to be lost to the freezing temperatures in his sodden boots. Not only is he no longer numb, but he is downright hot - a feeling he forgot existed in the icy misery of the storm - and his body aches in places he wasn’t sure he had muscles to ache.
Still, I made it! I’m alive, he thinks gleefully, and I made it!
The blissful hysteria makes him laugh to himself a bit before he hears the gentle sound of a throat being cleared beside him. Though he can barely turn his head before his neck screams in disapproval, he can see a young woman dressed in signature Earth Kingdom greens peering at him quizically from her place above a smoking iron pot.
Great, there goes my plan not to seem crazy in front of the pretty barmaids.
The ‘pretty barmaid’ in question unexpectedly seems to laugh at this and comes to sit beside him.
Oh my gods, psychic pretty barmaid.
“Not a barmaid,” she laughs. “Though my ma’s shop does sell liquor sometimes, I guess? And I hardly need to be a psychic when you’re talking aloud.”
Sokka shuts the mouth he never realised he had opened, which only seems to charm the shopkeeper’s daughter further. She gently helps him prop himself up against some pillows before spooning him a healthy serving of the contents of her pot. Warming his hands on the bowl, he peers down at what appears to be some sort of random assortment of vegetables floating in a pale, steaming broth. For the twenty-thousandth time since the storm began that night, Katara’s face rises unbidden in his mind, and he has to squint to hold back the tears that embarrassingly threaten to spill into his meal. The girl chimes in then, like an angel blessedly saving him from his fourth humiliating incident of their meeting (the first three of course being his unhinged giggling, his inability to sit up and, presumably, being found face down in the mud somewhere).
“So, stranger, what should I call you?” she asks, head propped up on her hands in an endearingly childlike way.
“Uh. I—, ” he stutters a little, tossed between the thrill of his heart and his suddenly fierce headache. “Name’s Sokka.” Nailed it.
“Well, Sokka,” she says, rolling the name around on her tongue, bemused. “I’m Meilin. My brother found you lying face-down in the mud—” (Called it) “—when he went out to calm the ostrich-horses last night. Not exactly a safe time or place for a nap, friend.”
Sokka laughs breathlessly at that, though the joke isn’t nearly funny enough to warrant it, because the surge of gratitude he feels for Meilin and her faceless brother is so strong that it alone makes him feel a little stronger.
You could have died, he thinks at himself deliriously, I could have died.
“Sooo?” she prompts, barely restraining her curiosity.
Sokka tries to recount the blurry events of the day prior with limited success. Though the specifics evade him, lost behind the curtains of his fever, he manages to eke out the meagre details for her - their flight towards Ba Sing Se, their attempts to wait out the rain in a cave overnight, the ambush. Meilin listens with wide eyes, humming with approval or gasping in shock politely.
“So the Avatar has been captured?” she says finally.
Sokka shuts his eyes against the quiet grief in her voice. She seems to take this as assent and is silent for a moment.
“I mean, I’d heard rumours that he was really back… and now he’s just gone again,” she murmurs. “I guess, nothing really changes for us, then.”
He can still hear the disappointment in her voice. Sokka is too tired to voice the anger that settles in him at that. Aang may be the Avatar, this… symbol of hope, but he was Sokka’s friend first, goddamnit.
Ok, he admits begrudgingly, maybe not first, but the point still stands.
Despite the fact that Sokka is fairly certain he’s learned his lesson about speaking his thoughts aloud, Meilin looks chastened for a moment.
“I am sorry, though. We’ve had more than our fair share of run-ins with the Fire Nation, and your story is… terrifying. I- I’m so sorry about your sister and… your friends.”
He nods, though he refuses to speak in case his voice breaks. She nods in return, and he awkwardly nods back again. This seems to break the tension - she cracks a small smile, and they turn their attention back to their bowls.
“You are welcome to stay here as long as you’d like,” she says finally after what Sokka considers his most unpleasantly long and silent soup experience. He gives her the widest smile he can muster.
“Thank you for everything, Meilin. I really mean it, you’re a lifesaver and the… soup was delicious.” She nods gravely at this, as though she had anticipated the entire comment, compliments and all.
“…But I have to go.” This makes her pause.
Sokka swings his legs over the side of the bed and tries to blink away the sudden blur that overtakes his vision.
“This is a port, right? If I can get to Ba Sing Se, I can ask the Earth King for help.”
“The Earth King?” Meilin repeats incredulously.
“Well, it’s not exactly like I can fight an entire Fire Nation crew on my own? I mean, though that might be hard to believe,” he winks.
Meilin just keeps staring at him, which is what he is used to garnering from his flirtatious comments. After a few moments, her mouth downturns deeply and she looks utterly downcast. Also not… an uncommon response to his comments but Sokka honestly didn’t think that one was that bad.
“Do you really think the Earth King will… listen to you?”
Sokka huffs a laugh at that. “The Avatar has been captured! I’d have more trouble getting his help if I were a god.”
She ponders that for a moment, seemingly unconvinced. Still, she smiles a small, tired smile and nods anyway.
“There are boats leaving for Ba Sing Se from here. They’re filled with refugees, so it might be tough to get a ticket, but I could ask my brother to inquire for you.”
Sokka leaps to his feet at that and struggles to avoid reacquainting his face with the ground for a moment before grasping her hands in his own.
“Thank you, thank you, Meilin! Thank you so much!”
She laughs openly at that, and Sokka is glad the uneasy atmosphere of the last few minutes has dissipated so easily.
“First, you need to rest,” she asserts, shoving him back into bed and placing her hands firmly on her hips. “Then, we can discuss you leaving.”
For the twenty-thousand-and-first time since the storm began, Sokka thinks of Katara.