Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Sokka doesn’t end up needing to paddle a canoe in pursuit of a Fire Nation ship.

He ends up flying a bison after it, instead.                                                                                               

Sokka’s making the final preparations for their departure, Gran Gran is saying her goodbyes to Katara, and some of their tribemates have come to see them off – or, to see Katara off, more specifically, since none of them care about what Sokka does or where he goes.

And, actually, that’s not quite right either. Sure, some of them don’t seem to care that Sokka’s leaving, but others? Others are outright relieved. Kani seems to have shown up specifically to make sure he leaves. She doesn’t take her eyes off him, the weight of her glare digging into Sokka’s back as he readies the canoe, and Sokka thinks to himself that he might miss his village, once it’s behind him, but he certainly will not miss Kani.

(He wonders what she would say if she realised that the soldier who led the assault is Sokka’s soulmate. Wonders what any of them would say. He can’t even count on Katara having his back, given that his soulmate just kidnapped hers. Thank Tui and La that the villagers were too far away to realise that the soldier had blue eyes.)

Whatever, it’s fine. He’s been dealing with this sort of thing for years – the hateful  glares and the eyes narrowed with mistrust, as well as the unspoken but blatant wishing from some of his tribe that he would just… leave.

No one ever said it aloud – never dared to, not with Hakoda as his father; Hakoda, who might not look at Sokka properly or even trust him to fight Fire Nation soldiers, but who would doubtlessly react with outrage and offence if anyone wished aloud for one of his children, one of Kya’s children, to be banished – but that never stopped Sokka from knowing that many of them wished he would simply vanish from sight. Wished that he would just… take a canoe, paddle out to the horizon, and keep going, never to darken the Southern Water Tribe with his presence ever again.

It makes him snort wryly to himself as he realises that all those people are about to get their wish. He’s leaving, and he’s likely to die on this mission to rescue Aang, so… ta da. Wish granted. How nice for them.

It doesn’t take long for Sokka to say his goodbyes (Gran Gran is the only one he needs to say farewell to, and she smiles at him and kisses him gently on the forehead, avoiding his wound, and tells him to take care of himself and his sister, and never looks him in the eye once) but Katara – given that she has so many more people who actually want to say goodbye to her – takes longer, even as she tries to rush through it all, and by the time they finally get into the canoe and prepare to set off, Sokka’s hopes of ever managing to catch up to the warship are low. It may be easier to navigate the drifting icebergs in a canoe than in a metal monstrosity, but the metal monstrosity is fire-powered, and not reliant on oars. If they don’t catch up to it before it makes it out to the open ocean, Sokka doesn’t think they’ll ever catch it.

Which means they’ll need to mount a rescue in the Fire Nation itself, which is…. a concept that Sokka doesn’t want to face until he absolutely has to, actually. Because if Sokka doubts their ability to get in and out of a Fire Nation warship without bloodshed, then their chances of infiltrating the Fire Nation itself are… not fantastic.

It's as he’s thinking these grim thoughts that Aang’s six-legged animal companion comes lumbering over the nearest hill.

It –

(“He,” Katara insists, the first time she hears Sokka calling the creature an it)

– bellows a sound that’s halfway between a roar and a groan, and Sokka barely barely has time to blink at its sudden arrival before Katara’s abandoning the canoe and rushing to it with a cry.

“Oh, Appa!” she says to it, throwing her arms around its huge forehead. “I’m so sorry, boy! They took him! But we’re gonna get him back – can you – will you help us? You’ll be faster than a canoe, we’ll be able to catch up to them a lot easier, will you help?”

Which is how Sokka winds up sitting in the saddle of an animal he didn’t even know existed last week. And even though it’s only swimming, it’s still much faster than the canoe would have been – and, Sokka’s not having to use his own muscles to move the bison, unlike he would have had to do with a canoe, meaning he can save his strength for later. All told, it’s a win-win.

Katara’s insistent that the creature can fly, though. Aang said it could, she asserts. So therefore, it must.

But honestly… Sokka still has his doubts.

Aang may have been convinced the creature could fly, but the kid’s, like, twelve. Twelve-year-olds have notoriously fanciful imaginations.

The bison is all kinds of anatomically incompatible with flight. It makes absolutely no sense to think it can fly. It’s huge, and it’s heavy, and it’s not exactly streamlined, what with its six legs and its dense fur. It doesn’t even have wings – how is it supposed to get in the air? Sheer willpower?

So no, Sokka doesn’t think it can fly. But Katara does, so Sokka sits in the saddle and half-heartedly throws out random words and sounds, trying to remember the phrase Aang used the first time he tried to make the bison fly.

And it takes a while, but eventually Sokka absently tries “Yip yip?” and the anatomically-impossible bison groans, and –

Well huh. Look at that. The sky bison can fly after all.

Ok. That’s cool. Very cool, in fact. Not that Sokka’s going to let Katara know he thinks so, of course. She’s already got her smug I told you so face on, Sokka knows without even looking at her; he’s not going to give her reason for more smugness by shrieking with excitement over the fact that they’re flying.

And flying fast, too.

Flying, it turns out, is way faster than canoeing or having Appa swim along. At this rate, they’ll catch the ship in no time.

And oh, wow, ah. That’s a sobering thought.

Any desire to whoop with excitement at the fact that he’s flying through the air dries up in a heartbeat as Sokka realises that he’s suddenly a lot closer to the part of this mission where he’s going to try and fight his way through an army of Fire Nation soldiers to rescue Katara’s soulmate.

An army of Fire Nation soldiers… that includes his own soulmate.

Sokka… isn’t quite sure he’s ready to face the other boy again so soon, to be honest.

It’s not the probability of dying that he’s concerned about.

That’s not a pleasant concept, obviously, and it’s one he’ll avoid if he can. But given that he expected to die earlier today, he’s kind of already come to terms with the notion, and he figures that every minute he’s still breathing is something of a bonus.

But meeting his soulmate earlier today? Fighting him? Watching him walk away without so much as learning his name? Yeah, all that is stuff that Sokka… was not remotely prepared for. That he wasn’t braced for. It was so utterly unexpected, and it’s rattled him far more than the concept of facing certain death in defence of his village did. If he’s honest with himself, he hasn’t remotely managed to shake off all the emotions that hit him when he came face to face with his soulmate. The shock, and the dismay, and the hurt. The longing.

Tui, the longing.

The longing that’s so, so unwelcome but so, so loud. Loud in his head, loud in his heart, loud in every fibre of his body.

The longing to reach out to his soulmate; to tangle their fingers together in a firm, warm grasp, and the soul-deep desire to press their foreheads together and just be. The urgent, desperate want to curl up with him some place warm – by the fire or in a quiet igloo – and revel in the proximity of the other half of his soul; to look at him until his features are committed to memory; to bask in and soak up his presence. To look his soulmate in the eyes and see himself reflected there in the blue irises; to know that the other boy is doing the same; to feel the warmth in his chest that is the sensation of two souls joining together as one, just as they were always meant to.

And he doesn’t want it – doesn’t want to feel the agonising, soul-deep yearning for someone that Sokka knows is evil… but no matter how much he closes his eyes and clenches his fists and wills the feeling away, he can’t shake it. Can’t shake the physical, tangible ache in his chest at the knowledge that his soulmate walked away from him, and that Sokka let him.

He can’t shake the concussion, either, he realises, as Appa banks sharply. The motion makes Sokka’s brain rattle in his skull and makes nausea build at the back of his throat, and he presses a hand to his head and swallows desperately.

He might not be able to will away his stupid feelings, but he absolutely refuses to let a simple head wound reduce him to throwing up over the side of the bison’s saddle like some winter-fresh child who’s never been out on the waves before.

Appa levels out, and it takes several long moments for the pain in Sokka’s head and the accompanying nausea to pass, but finally, it does, and he cautiously opens his eyes again.

“Are you ok?” he hears, and looks up to find Katara looking at him – at the wound on his head, more precisely – with worry, which… throws him, for a second.

It’s been… a while since Katara’s looked at him with anything approaching concern. Even before the warriors all left, and Sokka would come home bruised and bleeding after being cornered by some of the older boys, Katara was more likely to scold him for getting caught on his own rather than fret over his injuries. So this apparent worry is… unexpected and unusual, and Sokka doesn’t know what to make of it. First there was Gran Gran’s weird behaviour earlier today, with her fussing all over his wound, and now Katara’s being weird too, and Sokka’s… a bit baffled by it all, to be honest.

But then his confusion clears. He’s their only chance of getting Aang, he realises. Tui knows Katara isn’t skilled enough with her magic water tricks to pull off a rescue by herself, no matter how much righteous determination she brings to the table. Spirits, even with Sokka, she’s gotta know that their chances of getting Aang out are low. Without Sokka (or with him compromised thanks to an earlier injury) their chances of success diminish even further.

“Don’t worry,” Sokka says, looking at her shoulder and trying for a reassuring smile. He’s not sure that he manages it. “This won’t stop me from getting your soulmate back.”

That’s a blatant lie, of course, because it very well might, but he’s going to do everything he can to push through and get this done.

Peripherally, he sees Katara frown.

“That’s not what I– ” she starts, and then sighs. “Never mind,” she settles for, and turns to face the front again. “We’re nearly there.”

She’s right, Sokka realises with a sinking stomach.

They can’t see the ship yet – not in amongst the forest of icebergs it’s currently traveling between – but they’ve been following its smoke trail, and it’s now starting to become less of a trail and more of a billowing cloud as they get closer to the source of the smoke.

Tui and La, Sokka is… not remotely ready to see his soulmate again.

The hot, searing pain that had erupted in his chest as his soulmate walked away from him has lessened slightly, in the hours since it happened, but it’s absolutely still there. It’s an ache, now, as opposed to the sharp, hot, stabbing pain it was earlier, but it’s still enough to distract him and make him a bit breathless. It feels like a fresh bruise. Not the bright searing pain you get from a new wound at the moment of impact, but the insistent, painful throbbing of the bruise that follows.

He keeps rubbing absently at his chest without even realising it, and he clenches his teeth in irritation every time he catches himself doing it.

Will the pain happen again, he wonders, peering ahead with narrowed eyes as he tries to see through the smoke. If he succeeds in rescuing Aang, and against all the odds somehow manages to get the kid and Katara and himself back on the bison and away without any of them dying – will his chest try to tear itself open again?

Will it be worse, the second time?

What if he winds up having to kill the guy?

Or – what if his soulmate is the one to kill Sokka? Which is… by far the more likely outcome, if Sokka’s being honest. After all, he’s not exactly functioning at full capacity right now, and he barely got out of their last fight alive. Sokka doesn’t like his chances of walking away from another fight with the guy. So what happens then? What happens to a soul if it kills its other half? Has that ever even happened before?

Sokka doesn’t know. Doesn’t want to know.

To be honest, he’s kind of desperately hoping that the bender will somehow be out of the picture for this upcoming fight. Sokka knows it’s not likely, but surely the moon and ocean spirits can have his back this one time? They kind of owe him one, for saddling him with a fire bending jerk as a soulmate in the first place. Surely they can cut him a break just this once and let him get onto the ship, get Aang, and get off again without even seeing the blue-eyed ruiner-of-lives.

(He… doesn’t like his odds, to be frank.)

“There they are!” Katara cries suddenly, and Sokka doesn’t have any more time to quietly panic about how he’s very probably about to die on a Fire Nation warship whilst attempting to (and probably failing to) rescue his sister’s soulmate from the clutches of his own.

---

Sokka doesn’t end up dying on a Fire Nation warship.

He barely has to set foot on the ship at all, in the end. Because it turns out that Aang is a wily little thing, and he's managed to get himself free.

That’s the first thing Sokka notices, the moment that he, Katara and Appa emerge from the smoke cloud and get their first look at the ship since it left their village. Aang is free, they immediately see. He’s somehow managed to get his manacles off, and is fighting desperately against someone who’s throwing rather a lot of fire at him. 

The someone, Sokka realises a heartbeat later, is the blue-eyed bender. Sokka’s not close enough to see the guy’s face clearly, but he recognises the uniform – different to all the other uniforms, with its stupid pointy shoulders and the nonsensical lack of a face mask.

Sokka’s soulmate is currently trying to burn Katara’s soulmate to a crisp. Because of course. Of course. What more could Sokka expect, really? He already knows the Spirits hate him; this really shouldn’t come as a surprise.

So much for getting in and out without seeing the guy, Sokka thinks, resigned, as Appa opens his giant mouth and bellows, and the two fighting benders both look up.

“Appa!” Aang cries, delighted, shouting so loud that his voice is easily heard even at this distance, and then he spots Katara and his whole face transforms into an expression of unfettered joy. “Katara!”

The firebender, meanwhile, is visibly experiencing emotions at the opposite end of the spectrum to Aang. Sokka’s not close enough to be able to make eye contact, if he even wanted to do that (which he so, so very much does not want), but he is close enough to see the bender’s reaction.

The guy looks up and sees the bison, and his face twists with startled anger, the expression blooming on his face with the speed of a flame licking up the side of a tinder-dry twig. And then he sees Sokka, and his whole body spasms with shock, mouth falling open and eyes going wide as a myriad of emotions flick across his face.

There’s shock in there, evident even at this distance and only getting clearer as Appa barrels closer to the ship with every moment. The firebender obviously wasn’t expecting to be confronted with his soulmate, arriving by way of flying bison – and honestly, that’s fair. Sokka figures he’d be pretty surprised too, if their places were reversed.

But it’s the surprised pain and the longing in the guy’s expression that hit Sokka like a punch to the throat. The raw expression is only there for a heartbeat – for the barest hint of a second – before it’s smothered, but for that single second, the firebender’s face reflects the exact same sense of desperate, painful longing that Sokka’s been trying in vain to fight off since the two of them first locked eyes.

It’s gone in an instant, though. For just one tiny heartbeat of a moment, the bender’s face reflects Sokka’s own emotions – and then the bender’s expression transforms into one of furious determination.

“Aang, look out!” Sokka hollers, panicked, because he somehow knows what’s coming.

Aang looks away from Katara just in time to dodge a fierce blast from the fire bender. The guy was hardly pulling his punches before, from what Sokka saw, but now he’s pressing forwards with even more rage and power, each blast of fire furious and desperate and wild.

Appa’s flying as fast as he can, but he and the Water Tribe siblings are still too far away to be able to intervene, and it’s only a matter of moments before Aang is corralled against the ship’s railing, putting up a desperate defence but still backed up as far as he can go – and then there’s another huge, wild blast of fire, and the airbender kid is knocked clean over the side of the ship and into the frigid water below.

Katara’s scream of panicked denial is one that Sokka knows, the instant he hears it, will haunt his nightmares for eternity.

Appa redirects without needing to be told – angling immediately for the spot where Aang went into the water.

But then --

Well. Turns out the kid hadn’t been lying when he said he was the Avatar.

Because the person who rises up from the depths on a swirling tower of water is wearing the same clothes as Aang, but is definitely not the same cheerful little kid who’s happily been making a ruckus of Sokka’s life since he arrived in it this morning –

(and oh, Tui, this morning seems like an awfully long time ago)

– but someone who is decidedly more.

The glowing eyes and the glowing tattoos are enough of a clue that something… unusual is going down, but the way that the kid lifts himself up out of the ocean on a huge tornado of water, which he then dumps onto the ship with the same amount of ease as though he’s swatting a mothfly is… something to behold.

Sokka’s mouth hangs open as he stares, stunned into silence by the raw power and effortless ferocity. He tears his gaze away from Aang (still hovering above them all on a twisting tower of water; and still glowing, his expression cold and furious and terrifyingly blank) to take in the damage to the ugly metal ship.

And his heart seizes in his chest.

Because the flood of water that Aang dumped on the deck has washed several of the fire benders overboard.

Including the blue-eyed leader.

Sokka feels the panic flood through his chest, and he instantly hates it – but he can’t help it. Time slows to a crawl as the adrenaline and terror rush through his veins like ice, and it makes his lungs stutter, because Sokka knows how cold that water down there is. They’ve lost more people in their tribe to the ocean’s cold than they have to famine and disease combined. The water out here will start to freeze a man’s blood in his veins within seconds, and it will kill within minutes.

And Sokka’s soulmate has just been swept into it.

The panic is overwhelming – a clawed, writhing thing in his throat – and Sokka wants to dive in after his soulmate and pull him out. The guy is from the Fire Nation – it’s hot there. He won’t be used to the arctic southern temperatures. Sokka, though, is used to the cold. He’s not immune to it, of course, but he’s more used to it than the firebender will be. He’s more prepared for the brain-numbing shock of the cold water and the way your breath catches in your chest; he’s more likely to be able to push through it. He’ll be able to last long enough in the water that he’ll be able to pull the bender back onto the ship.

All of this goes through Sokka’s head in a heartbeat, and it takes him another heartbeat to register what, exactly, he’s thinking. His hands are on the rim of Appa’s saddle – body tense and muscles ready as he scours the water looking for stupidly pointy uniform – before he realises what he’s doing.

Tui and La, he’s not going to jump in after the guy. What’s he thinking? The guy is evil – he’s a firebender and he’s the one who led the attack against Sokka’s village and he’s the one who kidnapped a twelve year old kid and he is evil, evil, evil – and Sokka will not be beholden to his stupid, unwanted, inconvenient soulmate-inspired instincts. He won’t. He refuses.

It takes a monumental effort to pull his gaze away from the churning water, but he does it. He prises his hands off the railing and balls them into fists, nails digging painfully into his palms, and he studiously ignores the way that his hands are shaking violently. Spirits, the drive to leap over the edge in search of his soulmate is nearly overwhelming.

Sokka closes his eyes and grits his teeth and deliberately turns away from the railing. Tries to refocus on the world around him.

It’s only been seconds since Aang popped up out of the water all glow-y, no matter that it feels like it’s been an eternity. The adrenaline is still thundering through Sokka’s veins, and everything feels as though it’s moving as slow as a glacier drifting through the icefloes. 

Appa had kept flying, while Sokka was distracted with his irrational panic, and Sokka’s suddenly extra-glad that Katara’s the one who’s directing the beast. Not only because she’s kept her focus where it should be, and has successfully guided Appa so close to the ship that he’s nearly on the deck, but also because it means that she completely missed Sokka’s… moment.

She’s utterly focused on Aang – who’s in the process of lowering himself onto the deck, now, still all glowy – and she hasn’t even noticed that Sokka nearly threw himself overboard in pursuit of a pointy, evil, village-attacking asshole.

Sokka takes a moment to be grateful for that.

Appa touches down on the deck of the ship, and the thud of all six feet landing does more to jar Sokka back to reality than anything else has so far.

Katara’s off like an arctic rabbit-fox out of its den, and Sokka scrambles to follow, not willing to allow his sister to venture alone onto an enemy ship, even if none of the enemies are actually in range of attack right now.

He jumps down from the saddle and lands lightly on the deck, knees and ankles flexing to absorb the force of the landing. His head throbs wildly at the impact and the world tilts a little, but Sokka’s grown up on ships  and is very used to accounting for a tilting landscape, so he grits his teeth and pushes through the dizziness in time to see Katara rushing to where Aang is just touching down on the deck and – oh. And collapsing.

The glowing tattoos and glowing eyes fade back to their normal, non-luminous colour, and Aang staggers sideways as soon as the glow vanishes. Katara catches him with a cry of alarm and Sokka moves to help, but the kid isn’t unconscious – just exhausted.

“My glider,” he says in a voice that’s weak but urgent, just as Sokka gets to their side, and Sokka looks at where Aang is gesturing to see the wooden staff lying abandoned on the deck.

“I’ve got him, go,” Katara says, and Sokka goes. He’d like to say he runs, but honestly, the concussion is still doing a number on him, and it’s less of a “run” and more of a “quick stagger” across the deck.

The staff is lying half on and half off the ship, the end of it poking out through an access-gap in the otherwise solid railing, and Sokka grabs it and spins back towards Katara and Aang in the same movement – only to be pulled up short by an unexpected weight on the end of the staff.

He whirls back around, expecting to find the end of it caught on something, somehow – tangled in mooring lines, perhaps – but instead, for the second time today, he comes face to face with his soulmate.

The other boy is saturated, water running in rivulets down his face and off his stupid pointy shoulders. He’s holding onto the end of the staff, and he looks just as shocked by the sudden appearance of his soulmate at the end of an airbender’s glider as Sokka feels.

Their eyes lock automatically – there’s something about coming unexpectedly face to face with a person that results in automatic, accidental eye contact, even when you’re as adverse to that as Sokka is – and Sokka feels the warmth in his chest come rushing back with a joyful vengeance.

It does feel joyful, too. Sokka knows that the sense of elation in his chest certainly isn’t coming from him, but he also knows it’s not coming from his soulmate. It’s coming from somewhere deeper than either of them.

It – it feels like his very bones are singing out in joy at being face-to-face with his soulmate again. He might not be happy to be here again, so close to his soulmate – but his soul is.

The other boy’s face is a flurry of emotions that Sokka suspects matches his own, and the guy has one hand still wrapped around the end of Aang’s staff and the other holding on to the metal railing while the rest of his body hangs off the edge of the ship, and he’s dripping wet and must be freezing, but Sokka sees no sign of the cold in his face. What he can see, is the same surprise and longing and anger and denial and desperate, desperate joy that Sokka knows his own face must be displaying.

(And Sokka knows, knows, that it’s going to hurt just as much this time, when he walks away, as it did when the pointy bender was the one doing the leaving, back at the village.)

“Sokka, come on,” Katara yells, and Sokka snaps out of it.

So does the firebender, who starts clambering up onto the deck properly, using a combination of the staff Sokka’s still holding the other end of, and the railing, and uh, no, nope, back over the edge with you, fireboy. If the firebender gets back up on deck before Appa is in the air, Sokka very much doubts their chances of getting out of here alive.

He uses the blunt staff to stab at the firebender, who lets out a startled snarl as the action nearly causes him to go tumbling back into the water again.

He doesn’t fall back into the ocean, but only just – and he does let go of the staff, grabbing instead at the edge of the deck, and Sokka wastes no time in spinning (slightly dizzily) on the spot and taking a step away from the edge (away from his soulmate) towards Appa.

And oh.

Oh, ow.

The pain that blooms in his chest as he takes the first step away from his soulmate isn’t as bad as it was the first time.

It’s worse.

It feels like someone’s stabbed him in the heart, and the searing pain of it is enough to have him gasping in surprise, steps faltering as the hand not grasping the staff comes up to press at his chest. The firebender behind him sucks in a pained breath at the same time Sokka does, and Sokka knows they’re both feeling the same thing.

But he can’t yield to it. Can’t yield to the desperate shrieking in the back of his brain that’s demanding he stop walking away; that’s demanding that he turn back around right now. He can’t do what the screeching desire wants; can’t turn around and help his soulmate up onto the deck; can’t go and wrap his arms around his soulmate and press his face into his soulmate’s shoulder.

He wants to. Tui and La, how he wants to. He doesn’t think he’s ever wanted anything so badly in his life. He wants to reach out his hands to his soulmate, feel his soulmate’s palms against his own. He wants to get them both somewhere nice and warm, and he wants to bask in the sensation of closeness as they recover from the day’s events.

But he can’t. Because his soulmate is an enemy soldier. Because Sokka has a concussion thanks to his soulmate’s actions, and he knows he’s lucky that’s all he got. Because his soulmate is an enemy who will not hesitate to kill Sokka, or his sister, or his sister’s soulmate.

So Sokka grits his teeth, and walks away.

And spirits, it’s hard. He feels like he’s the one who fell into the icy water. The pain in his chest feels the same as the stabbing agony that’s akin to falling in a fishing hole. He feels like he’s bleeding out, and his breath comes shorter and sharper as he forces himself to keep walking.

There’s scrabbling noises behind him as the bender tries to get himself up onto the deck, but between the ice-shock and the heartpain, he should be slowed down enough that Sokka can make it, staggering as quickly as he can, to his ride out of here.

He makes it to Appa, somehow, Aang’s staff clutched in one hand, and Katara reaches down to start pulling him up into the saddle – which he’s grateful for, because he absolutely would not have been able to clamber up there on his own.

“Go, go!” she yells over her shoulder, before Sokka’s even halfway up Appa’s side, and Sokka hears a “Yip yip!” and he’s not embarrassed to say that he yelps a little in surprise as Appa lifts off, Sokka still dangling from his side.

Katara heaves backwards, and Sokka uses his feet to help propel himself the rest of the way up Appa’s side, and he makes it over the edge of the saddle as he hears a breathless “No!” from the deck, and a blast of hot air misses him by a hair.

Sokka has neither the strength nor the agility to catch himself as he falls into the saddle, and he lands sprawled in the base of it, Aang’s staff clattering against the wood beside him, and he closes his eyes and tries to breathe through the pain. Through the throbbing pain in his head and through the agonising, searing pain in his chest.

“Are you ok?” Katara asks, and Sokka flaps a hand at her without opening his eyes. He will be. He thinks. He just needs a minute or two. Or ten, maybe. Or possibly a whole evening.

(Spirits it hurts.)

There’s another yell, and a flurry of movement from Aang, and Sokka cracks open one eye in time to see Aang leaping over his and Katara’s heads to – huh. To airbend a gigantic fireball away from them and into a nearby iceberg.

Well that’s. Handy.

…

The Fire Nation ship being freshly buried under a collapsed iceberg is exactly what they need in order to finish escaping, and it’s not long before the ship is left firmly in their wake.

The inarticulate bellows of rage from Sokka’s soulmate disappear into the distance well before the pain in Sokka’s chest fades. And even when it finally does start to lessen in intensity, it still doesn’t go away entirely, returning instead to the same dull, throbbing pain humming ceaselessly behind his heart that had plagued him through most of their boat-chase.  

Still. Dull throbbing is an improvement over the bright, sharp, stabbing pain of a new wound, and Sokka will take what he can get.

As they fly, Aang tells Sokka and Katara about how he escaped – and that he can’t waterbend yet. He can only airbend, he says; he hasn’t had a chance to learn waterbending yet, or earth or fire. He only recently found out he was the Avatar, he tells them. And he wasn’t happy about it, he confesses, something dark in his tone.

And – how on earth can the kid have only just found out he was the Avatar? The last avatar died over a century ago; the next one should have been born to the Air Nations immediately – not ninety-odd years later.

Tui and La, how long was this kid in the iceberg? Sokka’s starting to think he might have been an icicle since before the war. Which shouldn’t make sense as an option, but the evidence is starting to pile up.

For one thing, getting trapped in an iceberg should mean an inevitable and rapid death sentence. Quite aside from being literally frozen, the oxygen deprivation would be enough to kill literally any living creature within minutes.

And yet here Aang sits: alive and very much not dead. Must be the Avatar-ness of it all, Sokka figures.  

In which case, now that Sokka thinks about it: why can’t he have been in there for a hundred years? An hour inside a frozen oxygenless iceberg should render a person just as dead as a hundred years of it. Maybe the kid has been in there for a century. It would explain how he only recently found out he was the avatar, why he didn’t know about the war, why he uses weird phrases, why he didn’t know the Fire Nation are bad.

It would explain why he has no issue looking Sokka in the eye. If he comes from a time where a firebender isn’t literally the worst possible soulmate a person could have, then he wouldn’t be repulsed by Sokka’s eye colour, would he?

…Or maybe Sokka is just really badly concussed, and he’s coming up with absolute nonsense theories. That’s also a possibility.

It’s a possibility that Sokka dismisses a few days later, when he’s nearly blown off the side of the Southern Air Temple as Aang comes to sudden and unpleasant grips with reality.

The Water Tribe siblings had been wary, when had Aang pitched a visit to the Southern Air Temple before they set out for the Northern Water Tribe in earnest.

No one’s seen an air nomad in a century, Katara had said gently, carefully; her hand clasped firmly in Aang’s.

Yeah, because they’ve all been in hiding! Aang had replied, certain and sure.

But there are no Air Nomads in hiding at the Southern Air Temple. There are no people at the Southern Air Temple, aside from Aang, Katara, and Sokka themselves.

The only things at the Southern Air Temple are a flying lemur, which Sokka’s not allowed to eat because Aang adopts it instead; a whole lot of abandoned, crumbling buildings…

And a whole lot of skeletons.

They’re everywhere, once you know where to look.

The trio of travellers don’t notice them immediately, as there are none in any of the exposed walkways or open air gardens. Scavengers, Sokka later thinks to himself. That, or time and exposure to the elements has worn the bodies away to nothing. Because once they start looking in the more sheltered places, like in alcoves or inside the temples themselves, the skeletons are everywhere. Lying right where they fell. Right where they were struck down.

In Aang’s opinion, the worst skeleton they find is that of a man with a beaded necklace. He’s surrounded by piles of dead firebenders, and the sight of him is what sends Aang into a rage that nearly blows all of them off the cliff and which Katara only barely manages to talk him down from.

But in Sokka’s opinion, the worst are the skeletons of the kids.

After their brief but terrifying encounter with the Avatar State, Sokka leaves Katara to comfort Aang and goes searching nearby for anything that might be useful. Maps, food, weapons – anything, really. He’s not too proud to say that he’s simply giving Aang and Katara a few minutes to themselves, as the air bender sobs brokenly into his soulmates arms at the loss he’s only just realising he’s experienced.

What Sokka finds is a room full of tiny little bones, all of them clustered close to each other and overlapping each other as though the kids had been huddled together when they were killed.

There are bigger bones near the front of the collection. As though the oldest of the children had stood in front of the younger ones and faced down those who had come to kill them. Sokka’s uncomfortably reminded of the children back home, and how he’d sent them all to hide when the Fire Nation ship had arrived. These children hadn’t had that option.

Or maybe they had. Maybe this was where they hid, and they were found anyway. And when they were found, the oldest and bravest stood in front of the younger, more vulnerable kids, and protected them as best they could, even though they were so horribly outmatched.

And oh, Spirits, what if these children had been Aang’s friends?

Because it’s clear now that his time spent in the iceberg was a hundred years – or close enough to it so as to not matter. The man he recognised – Gyatso – had been nothing but bones. None of the bodies here are anything but bones. And fresh corpses don’t become bones in a mere few days. Nor weeks – or years, even. For the skeletons to be as far gone down the road of decomposition as they are means they’ve been here for decades, at the least. And the Avatar has been missing for a century.

And Sokka’s seen his power twice, now. Three times if you include the time he cracked open the iceberg. It seems pretty possible to Sokka – likely, even – that the storm Aang got lost in when he first fled the Southern Air Temple is one that happened a hundred years ago, and he really has been in the iceberg for a century.

Which means the children’s bones… some of which are skulls that look no bigger than Aang’s head is, some of which are smaller even than that… could legitimately be the bones of Aang’s friends.

Sokka… is maybe gonna throw up.

He manages not to. Manages to swallow back his bile and leave the room, pulling the rotting wooden door closed behind him.

He tells Katara and Aang that there’s nothing useful inside the temples, and they shouldn’t bother with them.

Katara looks at him like she knows there’s something he’s hiding from them, but then looks at Aang – still sniffing wetly and wiping at his eyes; calm, now, but still visibly devasted – and chooses not to press.

Sokka’s glad. The last thing they need is for Aang to find a room full of bones smaller than he is. It’s bad enough to realise your home has been invaded – and that your mentor has been killed – without also seeing the piled up corpses of children the same age as yourself and younger.

Not that Sokka’s able to keep Katara and Aang from seeing their fair share of non-children bones.

There are plenty of adult bones too – fallen Air Nomads, identifiable by the faded orange and yellow rags clinging to the bones that are all that’s left of the robes they once wore. And firebenders. Countless firebenders, whose stiff uniforms made of metal and leather have fared better in the century since they were felled than the Nomad’s robes have, but whose flesh has vanished from their bones just the same as the Nomads they died fighting.

Spirits, how many soldiers must have swarmed this Temple for there to be so many dead firebenders, yet for the Air Nomads to have been the ones who lost? The mountain must have been utterly overrun.

And this? This is what the Fire Nation does, Sokka thinks, as they see skeleton after skeleton. As the memory of that room full of children dances behind his eyes. They invade, and they slaughter, and then they leave, and they don’t leave so much as the children unscathed.

They’re evil, and Sokka hates them. The fact that his soulmate is one of them makes him sick to his stomach. It always has, but it’s a more visceral feeling, now. Sokka can taste the bile at the back of his throat when he thinks about it. When he thinks about blue eyes framed in a narrow, angular, pale face.

The pain in his chest – still there, even three days later; but lessened to a mostly-ignorable throb, by now – seems to beat more strongly in time with his heart at his hateful, rageful thoughts.

They don’t stay at the Temple for long, after they find Gyatso.

Katara and Sokka help Aang the man’s skeleton to rest, with Aang telling the siblings tales of the man’s life as they do so; explaining who he had been to Aang; everything he’d done for Aang – and then they leave.

“It’s not right,” Aang says as they fly away. He’s sat on the rear of Appa’s saddle, looking back at the crumbling Temple as Sokka sits on the bison’s neck and holds it’s reins, while Katara sits next to Aang and holds his hand as he silently cries.

“Leaving them all there,” Aang continues. “I should bring them all to the Resting Fields.”

The Resting Fields, where Air Nomads lay their dead to rest.

Sokka and Katara had followed Aang’s tearful instructions as they’d helped him transport what was left of Gyatso to the Resting Fields. They’d carefully collected his bones, and transported them up to the wide open grassy fields at the utter peak of the Temple, where they’d been carefully put to rest in a patch of Alpine daisies for the sun and the wind and time to one day reduce the bones to dust, which would float away on the breeze. 

It was the Air Nomad way, Aang had told them solemnly, as silent tears streamed down his cheeks, Gyatso’s necklace in his hand. Whenever someone died, their body would be placed at the highest plateau of the Temple, where they could rest in peace as their body was slowly reclaimed by the sky and air.

The Fire Nation burn their dead, Sokka knows. It’s as barbaric a practice as the rest of their heinous culture.

In the Earth Kingdom, they bury their dead. Weird, but, makes sense for them, Sokka figures. He can’t think of anything worse than being buried under rock and soil for eternity, but then, he’s used to the wide open tundra or the sprawling sea, so, maybe it’s just a preference thing.

The Water Tribes place their dead into canoes with trinkets from those who loved them, and set them adrift at sea for the water to claim.

But the Air Nomads, apparently, give their dead back to the sky.

“We’ll come back,” Katara promises, huddling closer to the quietly distraught airbender. “We’ll give them all the respect they deserve. We’ll take them all to the Resting Fields, one by one, until they’re all at peace.”

Aang had wanted to stay and do it now, Sokka knows. But with the revelation that the Fire Nation could in fact make it up the mountain, even without the ability of flight, and the fact that Sokka’s soulmate the ponytail guy from the Fire Nation ship was on their tail, Sokka had known they didn’t have the luxury of time. They escaped the firebenders once already. They wouldn’t likely be so lucky a second time, and they need to get to get to the Northern Water Tribe as soon as possible.

Maybe, if Aang can learn a second bending style, and Katara can learn enough to protect herself, then maybe, just maybe, the two of them might survive into adulthood, and become more than just child-sized bones on the floor of an abandoned temple.

…

Aang insists on going to some place called Kyoshi Island, so he can ride a giant fish.

So far as coping with grief goes, it’s not the worst mechanism Sokka’s seen.

Only, Aang doesn’t end up getting to ride his fish. Because 1) he nearly gets eaten by a giant eel instead, and 2) they get kidnapped.

By girls.

By warrior girls -- whose leader has the orange-gold eyes of a firesoul.

Just like Sokka.

“You– ” he says, staring at her, his own eyes wide.

“I…?” the girl asks, when Sokka fails to finish his sentence. She sounds haughty and amused, like whatever he’s going to say already promises to be both pathetic and hilarious.

“Your eyes,” he says, and his brain feels scrambled. He’s never seen someone else with the same coloured eyes as him. The Fire Nation soldiers that attacked his village included; all of them were behind masks. This girl, with her bright gold eyes and her bold warrior make up, is striking.

“Are gold, yes,” the girl finishes, still sounding amused. “But don’t think I’ll go easy on you, just because we’re soulkin.”

“Leave him alone!” Katara interjects, trying and failing to dislodge the hands holding her in place from her own set of surprise guards. “Let us go!”

“Hmm, no, I don’t think we will,” the girl with the golden eyes says, looking away from Sokka and over at Katara. “You’re trespassing, and we don’t take kindly to outsiders here. Especially uninvited ones. What are you doing on our island?”

She’s… the leader of these warriors, Sokka realises.

She’s the one who’s doing all the talking, and the one the others are all watching and deferring to.

The others all have eyes of Earth Kingdom green – and Sokka even sees one with Water Tribe blue (Northern Water Tribe; must be. There was no one in Sokka’s tribe with green eyes to match, so whoever this girl’s soulmate is, they must be in the North) – but none of them are calling the shots. None of them are in charge.

In a contingent of clearly capable Earth Kingdom warriors, how is the one with golden eyes the one in charge?

There’s not even any of the revulsion or bitterness or reluctance in any of the other warriors as they defer to her.

At home, the mothers all accepted Sokka’s position as the leader of their forces because there was literally no one else. Once all the older men left, the options for who would be in charge of training the new warriors and protecting the village fell to Sokka because the only other options were women with no combat training whatsoever, or one of the male kids even younger than Sokka. And the women of the tribe might have hated Sokka, but they weren’t stupid; they knew he was their best choice as a warrior leader.

But their every interaction with him had been tainted with suspicion. With bitterness, that he was the only choice. With revulsion, that they had to entrust their boys to his questionable care and guidance. With reluctance, that they were forced to rely on someone as untrustworthy as Sokka.

Sokka can see none of that here.

The girl with the golden eyes – the firesoul eyes – leads the rest of the warriors with an easy confidence and zero pushback.

Throughout the conversation that follows –

which starts with Aang’s cheerful “Well, see, I wanted to ride the giant koi,” and ends with “Wait, this is Kyoshi Island? I know Kyoshi!”

– the only thing Sokka sees from any of the warrior women is deference and… respect.

But that can’t be right.

Or, if it is, then this island can’t be trusted.

Sure, maybe they were loyal to Kyoshi once, but who’s to say they still are? It’s been a long time since Avatar Kyoshi roamed the earth. Or who’s to say that they aren’t loyal to a faulty memory of her, whilst also having turned their backs on the rest of the Earth Kingdom to serve the Fire Nation? How else can it be explained that their lead warrior is someone with a Fire Nation soulmate, yet still has everyone’s full trust?

Only… no one in the village makes a single move of hostility towards Aang.

After it’s revealed that he’s the Avatar, and a descendent of sorts of Kyoshi, the village welcome him with open arms. They put the three travellers up in a fancy house, and give them a range of food and supplies. They host a spontaneous festival that night, with a feast and dancing and everything.

And even though Sokka watches them all with narrowed, suspicious eyes, waiting for the other shoe to drop… they don’t try to whip a sack over Aang’s head, and don’t try to slip a sleeping draught into their food, and don’t try to slit their throats or tie them up or anything.

And Suki, the golden-eyed warrior leader? Walks amongst the rest of her village as though she’s one of them. As though she’s the same as them. And, impossibly, the villagers treat her the same as they treat the other warriors. With deference and respect. Genuine deference and respect, not a fabricated sort designed to get into her good graces in the hopes that she’ll spare them when she eventually turns traitor. She seems genuinely liked by not only the rest of the warriors she leads, but by the village as a whole.

And Sokka doesn’t know what to do with that.

“Why do they all trust you so much?” he asks her abruptly.

It’s their first proper morning on Kyoshi. The welcome feast they threw for Aang last night had lasted well into the evening, and the village is quiet this morning as people sleep off the combination of too much alcohol paired with too little sleep. But Sokka’s awake – and so is the leader of the Kyoshi Warriors. 

“Excuse me?” Suki asks, eyebrow raised.

“The village,” Sokka elaborates. “The warriors. They all trust you. Why. What did you do to convince them to?”

She turns to face him with burgeoning offence and an unimpressed eyebrow.

“How did I convince them to trust me?” she echoes, brow arched high. “Is there a reason they shouldn’t?”

Sokka shrugs a little, and then gestures vaguely towards her face.

Her unimpressed expression turns even colder.

“Are you insinuating,” she starts, “that because my soulmate is Fire Nation, that I’m not to be trusted? Me, who was born and raised here; whose mother was a Kyoshi Warrior and raised me to follow her footsteps; who has spent my whole life working with the Warriors and striving to be worthy of the paint I wear?”

Sokka doesn’t know what’s so insulting about the insinuation. He’s naturally untrustworthy, after all, according to his village, despite that he’s spent his whole life trying to prove otherwise. Despite his father being the Chief. Despite giving his all to protect his village.

“I mean,” he says, trying to work out how to say yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying without, you know. Using those words in that order. “If you have a Fire Nation soulmate, then, surely…”

“Are you planning to betray your people for your soulmate?” she interrupts archly. “Should I be worried about Aang? Are you going to hand him over to the Fire Nation, just to gain favour with your soulmate’s compatriots?”

“No,” Sokka says, and he has the sense to not sound offended. It’s a reasonable question. “I just wondered what you did to make them not think that you would do that.”

She squints at him, indignant and suspicious – and something in his face must tell her something, because eventually her expression shifts into something less indignant and more like burgeoning curiosity.

“Why are you asking?” she asks, her tone less hostile and more… probing.

Sokka shrugs, abruptly self-conscious.

“Just curious,” he says, because that’s better than saying because whatever it was, maybe I can do the same thing with my tribe.

“…Is it because your village doesn’t trust you? Because of your eyes?” she asks, far too perceptive.

Ok, that’s enough conversation for Sokka’s tastes.  

“Look, I just wondered what someone with a firesoul could have done to convince everyone to trust her,” Sokka says instead of answering, turning to leave. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

She catches him by the arm before he’s gone three paces.

“My mother always warned me that people off-island wouldn’t be as accepting of my eye-colour as the people here always have been,” Suki says to his still-turned back. “I always assumed that it was because other people wouldn’t know me. Wouldn’t know that I’m not the kind of person to side with the Fire Nation just because it’s where my soulmate’s from. The people here have all known be since bibrth; they know my mother; knew my father. They know exactly the kind of person I am. They’ve never treated me differently because of my eye-colour.”

She moves around until she’s standing in front of him; takes in his turned-away face, and the fact that he hasn’t made proper eye contact with her once through this whole conversation, despite that the conversation was about their eyes.

“Your village isn’t like Kyoshi, is it?” she asks, and Sokka’s mouth ticks up in a rueful, self-depreciating smile.

“Not even slightly,” he confesses, and flickers his gaze up to meet hers properly for the first time since meeting her.

…

So, Suki is... kinda awesome. 

Not to go and fall in love with the first girl he meets outside his tribe's borders, but... Sokka has absolutely fallen at least a little bit in love with Suki. 

After their rather stilted initial conversation is over and done with, Suki says, “Come on – I bet no one’s given you a proper tour of the town yet,” and sets off to do just that, tugging Sokka along with her.

Conversation is a little awkward at first. Sokka’s not used to talking at length with anyone other than his sister and GranGran – and maybe Aang, more recently – but rather early in the tour Suki shows him to the village’s waterwheel, and Sokka’s so curious about it that he’s eight enthusiastic questions deep before he remembers to be self-conscious.

But by then, Suki’s met his enthusiasm with an easy cheer and no sign of boredom or irritation, so… maybe Sokka doesn’t have to reign it in after all.

And after that, it’s easy. Easy to spend the next couple of days walking and talking and getting to know each other and maybe-sorta-kinda falling just the tiniest little bit in love.

Suki’s often busy with her Kyoshi Warrior duties – training with the other girls, and patrolling with them – but she invites Sokka to patrol with her, and she seeks him out between training sessions and they get to know each other a little.

She's funny, for starters.

The first time she makes Sokka snort, he looks over at her with wide, shocked eyes. He can’t remember the last time someone made him laugh at all; much less like that -- a startled explosion of amused air forced through his nose at speed.

It’s... nice. 

She laughs at his jokes, too. Emboldened by her amusing observation, he adds his own – tentative, but trying not to let that show. Trying to project confidence, as though he makes jokes all the time that people laugh at. Which... ha, nope. 

But she does. Her face brightens and her grin widens as she giggles with delighted amusement at his witty comment, and he feels like he might have stars in his eyes as he looks at her.

She's an incredibly skilled warrior, too. Sokka offers, that first day, to show her some fighting stances and moves. He figures it’s only fair. Her people are housing Sokka and his companions; feeding them all; plying them with supplies for when their journey eventually continues. He doesn't have much to offer, in return, but he can at least try and teach her some moves, the way he's spent the last few years teaching the children of his Tribe. 

She accepts -- but it becomes rapidly apparent that she needs no instruction from him. 

He could use some instruction from her, though. His years of having no one to spar against have taken their toll, and she bests him easily the first, second, and third times they spar. 

He might get a bit huffy about it. 

Look, it stings, alright? To be bested so easily – and by a girl, no less. Sokka may have wanted to teach Katara how to wield a dagger so she could defend herself, but that doesn't mean he's used to the existence of female warriors. Not a single girl or woman in his tribe could fight. It’s a shock to find an island of women who not only fight, but who fight better than Sokka does. 

It's... humiliating. For years, he's been the only defence his tribe had – and that was kinda the only thing he had going for him; the only thing that gave him worth; gave him a purpose – and he's finding out now that he's not all that great at it. First, his soulmate put him into the snow with barely any effort at all. And now Suki, a girl, repeatedly bests him in what should be his spar to win? It's embarrassing. 

That coupled with the fact that Suki's village has never questioned her loyalty, while Sokka's has never done anything but question his, and it has him thinking that maybe they were onto something. Maybe they saw his every effort at fighting fall short and they thought they were doomed for sure if he was all they had to defend them. Or maybe they thought he was a bad warrior on purpose. That he was deliberately not trying, and teaching the kids the bare minimum, to make things all the easier for his fire nation soulmate, when he and his Fire Nation buddies one day showed up to put an end to the Southern Water Tribe for good. 

Still. No one ever became a better warrior by sulking about being bested. 

Suki does him the honour of not being smug when he goes to ask her to teach him, which is good of her. 

She does make him wear the uniform and the makeup, though, which he initially thinks is just to tease him – but once he starts practising with her and getting the hang of the fans and such, he learns some of the ways the uniform can be used to deflect or absorb blows. A sword that’s tangled in a wide sweep of fabric is a lesser threat than one that’s still free to swing around at leisure, and the matching paint on their faces serves to make it harder for their enemies to distinguish one warrior from another, or to tell exactly how many there are.

And they talk. Increasingly playful barbs while they’re sparring, scattered between improvement tips or encouragement. Jokes and banter, once they get the feel of each other’s humour.

And soulmate talk.

They come around to the soulmate talk often.

"I always assumed mine would be a Fire Nation rebel, you know?" Suki says, as they take a water break between bouts. "Or a conscientious objector, at the very least – though, I can’t really see myself being soulmated to a pacifist. But I mean… they can't all support the Fire Lord or this war, right? There have to be some good people there. Same as how the Earth Kingdom has bad people, even though we’re on the right side of this war. An entire nation can’t possibly be all-good or all-bad. Don’t you think?" 

"I suppose," Sokka says, non-committal. She nudges his shoulder. 

"Maybe yours is like mine," she says, conspiratorial. "A rebel. A traitor to their nation." 

Sokka snorts, rueful. 

"Yours might be," he says. "Mine isn't, though." 

Suki's cheeky smile slips. 

"That's the tone of someone who knows for sure," she says, and then, when Sokka doesn't reply, she adds, "You've met them?"

Sokka tilts a bitter smile her way. 

"On the battlefield," he says. He doesn't know why he's telling her this. Not even Katara knows, and he's known Katara for a lot longer than he’s known suki. 

But Suki's so easy to talk to, and the confession slips out of his mouth before he can stop it. It’s only once he’s admitted it that he realises what he’s just said, and he goes still and his eyes go wide with belated panic.

Spirits, what if she was only ok with him having a Fire Nation soulmate so long as the soulmate in question remained merely a concept, as opposed to a realised reality. What if she only accepted him because she assumed that his soulmate opposed their birth nation, like she assumes her own does? And now that he’s gone and outright admitted that his soulmate is an active hostile participant in the war, she’ll draw away, horror on her face; suspicion in her eyes. Tui and La, Sokka is such an idiot. He wouldn’t hold up to five minutes of interrogation. Just give him a pretty face and a willing ear and he’s spilling all his secrets, apparently, and now Suki’s gonna turn on him, just like his village, and –

"Oh," she says simply. After a long moment, she puts her hand on his arm. "I'm sorry." 

There’s no revulsion in her voice. No suspicion in her expression. No hesitation in her touch.

He blinks, the burgeoning panic receding a little.

“That’s it?” he asks, when she doesn’t say anything else.

She seems mildly perplexed by this response, and tilts her head curiously.

“What would you like me to say?” she asks.

“No, nothing,” he says, fumbling. “It’s just – no, it’s fine. Nothing. Forget I said anything.”

She peers at him over the lip of her mug, considering.

“On the battlefield,” she echoes, coming to some kind of internal realisation. “Were you expecting me to throw you out? Because your soulmate’s a soldier?”

Sokka’s mug of water is super interesting. The water in it is crystal clear and he can see straight to the bottom of the carefully grafted drinking vessel, down to the fine swirls in the base where its creator shaped it on the wheel.

The hand on his arm tightens.

“Sokka, I’m not gonna throw you out over that,” she says, earnest, and he snorts softly before he can stop himself.

“You should,” he says, and she draws back in surprise.

“He’s one of their leaders,” Sokka goes on, because… he doesn’t know why, actually. He should shut his mouth, and go and start packing his and Katara and Aang’s things to leave. But the words bubble up and out his throat, and he’s saying them before he even realises they’re there. “He led the most recent attack on our village. He’s after Aang, can you believe it? Katara and I had barely found the kid, and then this guy shows up demanding we hand him over. That’s my soulmate. Someone who wants to kidnap a little kid and tear him and Katara away from each other and do Spirits know what to him. Kill him, probably. Finish the job Sozin started. Take out the last air bender, just like they took out all those other little kids at the Air Temple, and then go home and get lorded as a hero, or whatever they do to celebrate kid-killers over there. That’s my soulmate. So you should throw me out. In fact, I don’t know why you haven’t yet.”

There’s silence when he’s done, and he doesn’t know when he turned his back to Suki, but he has. He’s staring blindly out the window into the town, where everyone’s going about their business, blissfully unaware that they’ve got the soulmate to some kind of Fire Nation sergeant right here in their midst.

He’d turned away from her because he couldn’t look at her while he confessed, but it occurs to him now that she could strike him down like this and he’d never see it coming. Could take the sharpened edge of her fans and slice them through the back of his neck, or could take the dirk she keeps tucked at her waist and shove it through the plates of armour she knows like the back of her hand, into Sokka’s spine, and that would be that.

He wonders, fleetingly, which she’ll choose.

Maybe it’s cowardly, to let her get him from behind like this. To not look death in the face like a man.

But it’s easier than looking at her face and seeing the friendly countenance shift into something angry and mistrustful, and if he’s looking away from her when she takes him out, then he won’t have to feel the hurt in his guts as the friendship they’ve built vanishes into hatred in a blink.

But it’s not a dirk to the ribs Sokka ends up feeling, or the slice of blades across the back of his neck.

It’s a hand – small, yet strong; and determined. Landing on his shoulder, and spinning him forcibly to face her.

“Sokka, that’s not your fault,” she says, and she’s not earnest anymore, but angry. Her voice is low and fierce, and her hand on his shoulder is clamped like a vice.

“Your soulmates choices are their own,” she goes on, and she sounds furious. But not at him, somehow. “You’re no more responsible for his actions than he is for yours. Or do you think his superiors would be happy to hear that his soulmate is helping the Avatar?”

That’s…

Sokka blinks, startled.

That’s something Sokka’s never thought of before.

“Exactly,” Suki says, in response to whatever expression just crossed Sokka’s face. “The only person whose actions you’re responsible for are your own,” she goes on. “So you met your soulmate and he’s a piece of rotted unagi flesh. Okay, that sucks – but what have you done since?”

Sokka frowns, confused. What does she mean what’s he done since? Nothing to stop his soulmate from terrorising more villages, that’s for sure. Sokka wasn’t even able to stop the guy from terrorising his own village.

“Did you abandon everything you’ve ever believed in to go and join him to fight on the Fire Nation’s side?” Suki prompts, when he doesn’t answer right away, and he rears back in disgust.

“Did I -- ? No! Of course not!” he says furiously, and she gestures with her free hand in a well there you go manner.

“No,” she echoes. “You went and got Aang back, and you took him to look for his people, and you’re escorting him North so he can get all trained up to fight the Fire Nation. Correct?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t cancel out—” he starts to say, but she removes her hand from his shoulder and claps it over his mouth instead.

“Bup, bup!” she interrupts. “Correct or not correct?”

She doesn’t actually give him the chance to answer, and instead uses the hand on his mouth to forcibly guide his head up and down in a nodding motion. He sends an unimpressed scowl at her over the top of her hand; an expression which she blithely ignores.

“Exactly,” she says instead, as though he’d replied properly. “Which tells me all I need to know about you. Who your soulmate is and what he’s done or is doing doesn’t mean anything to me. All that matters to me is that you’re the kind of guy who would go to rescue his sister’s soulmate, and would take the Avatar on a cross-country trip to go and get trained up. And the type of guy who gets his ass kicked by me and lets me put him in a dress,” she tacks on, grinning cheekily at him.

“—ey!” Sokka squawks, indignant, the half-cut-off hey emerging unfettered as she finally pulls her hand away from his mouth.

“Hey what?” she asks, faux innocent. “It suits you!”

He sends her a scowl that’s more playful now than he would have thought he’d be capable of managing a few minutes ago, and takes a swipe at her. From there, things devolve into a scuffle-slash-spar. Suki wins, but she has to work harder for the win today than she did a couple days ago, so Sokka’s taking that as a win.

And he doesn’t address her words. Not directly, at least. But they sit quietly in the back of his head, and he lets them. He can’t quite bring himself to look at her words too closely, and he certainly can’t bring himself to agree with her, but they sit in the back of his mind and marinate like a fish filet in fermented bean curd, and they… soften him a little. Just like the fish.

He doesn’t agree with her. He is a reflection of his soulmate, and his soulmate is a reflection of him. And it says a lot about Sokka that his soulmate is… that guy.

But… she was right that Sokka can’t control his soulmate’s actions. He can only control his own. So if he has to counter his soulmate’s influence on the world by seeing the Avatar safely through all his training, well. That’s what Sokka’s gonna do. Maybe it won’t be enough to offset his soulmate’s actions. But it’s all Sokka can do, so he’s gonna do it with every cell in his body.   

It takes Katara a little while to notice how much time Sokka's spending with Suki, distracted as she is with preparing long-storage foods and clothes for their journey north, as well as juggling whatever weirdness is happening with Aang and his newfound stardom amongst the village's tweens — but once she does, she's not exactly in favour of the budding new friendship. 

"I just think you need to be careful, Sokka," she says the morning she finally cottons on, earnest and with an undercurrent of worry. They’ve been here several days, now, and it really is well-past time to be gone. But Aang’s been enjoying himself, and neither Sokka nor Katara have had the heart to move him along just yet. After their rather grim discoveries at the Air Temple, the kid deserves a bit of time to recuperate. But Sokka’s thinking they’ll need to leave tomorrow. The longer they stay in one place, the more dangerous it is.

"The people here have been welcoming and supportive, of course,” Katara goes on. “But..." 

"But, what?" Sokka asks. He has an inkling of what she's not quite managing to say, but he wants her to spell it out. Wants her to say it outright. 

"Well — Suki seems lovely," Katara says, visibly choosing her words with care. "And she hasn't done anything... questionable, or anything, but she still..." 

"Has golden eyes," Sokka finishes, voice cool, when Katara's words trail off. 

"I'm not saying that we can't trust her," Katara adds, hurried. "I'm just saying we should be careful." 

"Because her soulmate is Fire Nation, so obviously, she's worth less trust than someone normal," Sokka translates with a bitter note to his voice, something hot and spiky churning in his chest in front of the lowgrade ache from his ignored soulbond. 

Katara sends him a scolding look. 

"That's not what I said," she defends. "I don't think she's inherently untrustworthy; I'm just saying it would be smart if we were a little bit wary of her. This isn't home, Sokka — we don't know these people, not really. We don't know where any of their loyalties lie. We have to be careful. Any one of them might be sending word to the Fire Nation as we speak that the Avatar is here." 

"Any one of them could be, yeah," Sokka says, shorter than he usually is with Katara. "But Suki's the only one you're actually worried about." 

He doesn’t know why he’s responding badly to this. It’s no less than what he himself thought a few days ago.

But something’s changed, since then. He’s not sure when, but sometime between the Village’s acceptance of Suki, and Suki’s acceptance of Sokka, and her lecture about being in responsible only for his own actions and not his soulmate’s… something’s changed. Something’s lodged itself in Sokka’s throat and made a home there.

Katara huffs, frustrated. 

"You're twisting my words," she protests. 

"Am I though?" Sokka asks. "Why are you singling her out, amongst all these villagers, when: you're right — we don't know any of them. Any of them. Yet Suki is the one you single out to be wary of. Why is that, I wonder." 

Sokka's not being fair to Katara, he knows. She's only doing what he himself would have done a few short weeks ago. Spirits, a few short days ago. The him of last week had this exact same suspicion of Suki. The exact same wariness.

But now... whatever it is that’s lodged in his throat over the last few days is clawing at him, furious at the injustice of Katara’s suspicion.  

Her instinctive distrust of Suki because of her eye colour in a village that has never once judged her for it feels... jarring. More jarring than it should, since that kind of restrained hostility is exactly the kind of attitude Sokka is well, well accustomed to.

It's normal, to be suspicious of someone with golden eyes. It's just logical. Sensible. Natural. 

And yet, it makes Sokka feel... something. He's not sure what. Doesn't have a name for the hot, churning sensation in his throat. Doesn't have a description for the quietly roiling feelings that Katara's words are triggering. 

The difference between here and home is stark. This village treats Suki the same way they treat any other villager, and it feels like a wound in Sokka's chest. It... aches, that he didn't get that same level of trust from his tribe, despite spending his whole entire life trying to prove to them that he was loyal. 

And while most of him still thinks it's his fault — he's the one who failed to prove his trustworthiness to his village; they simply treated him like the threat any sane person would treat him as, and his attempts to prove his loyalty have consistently fallen short, and that's on him for not trying hard enough; for not being good enough — there's also a tiny, tiny part of him that wonders if... maybe...

Maybe things would have been different, if he'd grown up here instead of at home.

If he'd been born and raised here, on Kyoshi, would he have been treated the same as Suki has been? Like he could be trusted? Like he's worth something more than scorn and suspicion? 

And if Suki — wonderful, brave, talented, loyal Suki — had been born in the Southern Water Tribe, would she have been treated the way Sokka was? 

If the Southern Water Tribe had never been attacked by the Fire Nation, the way Kyoshi hasn't been, would that have changed things? Made them more trusting? Or — if it was the other way around; if Kyoshi had been attacked, would its people still trust Suki the way they do? Or would they view her with the same suspicion Sokka's been treated to his whole life? 

He doesn't know. There's no way to know the answers to any of these questions.

But he wonders, regardless. 

Katara's suspicion of Suki... it should feel normal. It should feel sensible. It's only logical, after all. Suki's heart's match is Fire Nation. One day she'll meet her soulmate, and then she'll be loyal to that person over the village that birthed and raised her. Loyal to her soulmate over her family. Over her nation. It just makes sense, to brace for that inevitable betrayal. 

But the conviction of his thoughts isn't there, anymore. And Sokka's not sure when or why that changed.

Is it that he's met his own soulmate, and hasn't turned his back on his people because of it, like everyone always assumed he would? Like he’d assumed Suki would believe he would, when she first found out who his soulmate was?

Or is it the culture shock of seeing Suki be so wholly accepted and trusted by her village, despite her eye colour? The shock of her finding out that his soulmate led an attack on a Water Tribe village, and the only reaction she had was sympathy, not suspicion.

Is it both, maybe?

Sokka doesn't know.

All he knows is that, a fortnight ago, he too would have mistrusted Suki based on the golden colour of her irises. And today, seeing Katara do that makes something hot and uncomfortable writhe sharply in his throat. 

Katara presses her lips together and breathes a short, calming breath out through her nose. 

"Do you think you might be... compromised, maybe?" she asks, level and gentle. 

Sokka slants a flat, vaguely questioning expression at her and waits for her to elaborate. 

"Look," she starts. "I know how hard this all is for you. I get it." 

You very much don't, Sokka thinks but doesn't say. Katara's eyes are a different colour to the rest of their tribe's, sure; but they're not golden. She never went to bed wondering if her tribe was right about her; wondering if he would one day betray everyone for someone whose soul matches his own. Never had to strive, every minute of the day, for so much as a flicker of acceptance from the rest of her tribe. She may understand what it is to have unusually-coloured eyes, but she has no idea what it's like for that colour to be gold. 

"And I know how it must feel — finally finding someone who's like you, after all this time," she goes on, oblivious to Sokka's thoughts. "Who's maybe faced the same kind of challenges you have, and has the same kind of choice ahead of her." 

His eyes sharpen at that last bit. 

The same kind of choice ahead of her? What does that mean? 

"But you can't let that blunt your wariness," Katara continues. "Just because you have the same eye colour, it doesn't mean you're the same." She reaches out and takes his hand, her eyes on their clasped palms instead of on his face. Instead of on his eyes. "I just don't want you to get hurt. Is that so bad of me?" 

Sokka doesn't get a lot of hand holding. Doesn't get a lot of physical contact from others of any kind, much less hand holding. 

He pulls away from Katara's hand anyway. 

"The same kind of choice ahead of her," he echoes, looking down at his hands as Katara's own retreat in the face of him pulling away. "What did you mean by that?" 

Her expression in his peripheral shifts into something rueful and sympathetic. 

"Sokka," she says, gentle. "You know what I mean." 

"Maybe," he concedes, because yeah, he's pretty sure he knows exactly what she means. "Elaborate anyway, just in case." 

Her huff of exhaled air is more frustrated, this time. 

"You don't know what it's like, yet," she says, gentle but resolved, and with that same note of wonder that enters her voice any time she thinks of her soulbond with Aang. "Meeting your soulmate, is — it's life-changing, Sokka. It's everything. It's —"

Her words trail off as she fails to find the vocabulary to describe what meeting one's soulmate is like. 

That's fine. It's not like Sokka needs her description. He has first-hand experience of what it's like, after all. 

Part of him is surprised he's managed to hide it from her. How she hasn't noticed his weird behaviour since meeting the Fire Nation jerk is a mystery, but he's grateful nonetheless. He's not ready for her to know. He doesn't know how she'll react, but he knows he doesn't want to find out just yet. 

"But what I'm saying is... it's easy to stay loyal to your tribe — to your people — when you haven't met your soulmate yet," Katara goes on, and something cold solidifies in Sokka's stomach at where this is going. "But you can't understand how everything shifts when you meet them. It's like... it's like if the tides suddenly changed direction. As though all the ocean currents flipped around on themselves and started flowing the other way. And you can't expect someone to fight against the tides, Sokka." 

Sokka's stomach feels cold and his mouth feels dry. He flicks his tongue out to wet his lips. He's not sure he'd be able to talk through how dry they are, otherwise. 

"So when I meet mine, I'm going to have to choose between — them, and our people," he concludes, barely catching himself in time to say them instead of him. His voice sounds hollow even to his own ears. Spirits. Even after all this time; even after everything he's strived to do, even his own sister thinks he'd struggle to choose between his soulmate and his people. "I'll have to choose between fighting the tide, and betraying everyone I love." 

Tui, he's so glad she doesn't know he's found his soulmate. 

"Of course not, don't be silly," Katara responds, short and annoyed.

Her words make Sokka blink, surprised.

"I know you'll choose your people," she goes on. "But that's because I know you, don't you see? I've known you my whole life, Sokka; I know exactly who you are. I know you'd never betray us — and never mind whoever your soulmate turns out to be. But Suki is a stranger. We don't know what she'd choose. We know is how strong the current is, but we don't know how good she is at swimming — or whether she even wants to swim at all." 

There's something conflicted churning in Sokka's guts, at that. 

Relief, that she doesn't seem to have any questions about what he'd choose; which way his loyalty would fall. But something jagged and sharp, that she would have such questions about Suki. 

Sure, he's only known her a short while, but he knows that she would never turn her back on her village, her family, just to join her soulmate. She's like him, he knows. Knows it in his bones, somehow. If her soulmate were like Sokka's, she would turn her back on them, not her people. And nevermind how strong the spirits-damned current is. 

He wonders if this is how the other tribespeople justified their mistrust of him. How well do we really know him? Do we know that he would choose to spend the rest of his life swimming against the tides, rather than betray us? 

"Suki thinks her soulmate might be a Fire Nation rebel," he says, instead of voicing any of the thoughts tangling around his brain. "After all, it's not as though everyone there can agree with what they're doing to the rest of the world. There has to be some people there who can think for themselves, right? What if her soulmate is one of them?" 

Why is it that everyone always thinks its Sokka and Suki who would betray their people, and not the other way around? That maybe their soulmates would be the ones who get pulled to their side. 

And — well. Granted, it's not like that's going to happen with Sokka's. But it could happen with Suki's. It's more likely by far than Suki turning traitor, at least. 

Katara purses her lips, unconvinced. 

"It's possible," she concedes. "I'm just… worried about you. You know that, right? I don't want you to trust her and then get hurt." 

Sokka blinks a little in surprise at that. It’s not often that Katara expresses concern for him. Her concern usually manifests as exasperation or irritated scolding at whatever situation he’s managed to get himself into.

It's... nice, he supposes. That she's looking out for him. 

She's entirely misguided about it, of course, but it's a nice feeling nonetheless. Even when her care comes with accidental barbs attached that feel like getting nicked repeatedly by a boning knife. 

“I know,” he says, suddenly wanting nothing more than to not be having this conversation any longer. Spirits, he’s tired. “I’ll be careful.”

Katara’s shoulders soften.

“That’s all I’m asking,” she says, and sends him a quiet smile.

She leaves, then – off to do whatever she does when she’s not casting doubt on the trustworthiness of the only friend Sokka’s ever had, and Sokka does what he’s spent the last few days doing. Getting dressed in Kyoshi Warrior garb to go and work on his combat skills with Suki.

The sparring session that follows ends up being their last.

Because Sokka’s soulmate finds them.

How he found them, Sokka doesn’t exactly have the chance to ask – but they have been here for longer than was wise, and that’s on Sokka. Word could have gotten out about their presence here any number of ways, and that’s exactly why Sokka should have made them move on days ago.

But he didn’t – too caught up in letting Aang heal from their discoveries at the Air Temple, and, yes, too busy enjoying companionship for the first time in his life – and now Suki’s village is under attack.

It comes out of nowhere, too.

One moment, everything is fine and Sokka’s just succeeded in throwing Suki to the training mat –

(He’s getting good at it, now, and they’re far more evenly matched now than they were when they first started sparring together)

– when one of Suki’s fellow warriors comes sprinting around the corner, yelling “We’re under attack! Fire Nation!”

And then she’s gone, sprinting right past them and continuing to holler at the top of her lungs. Sokka and Suki trade a single wide-eyed glance, and then they’re off, sprinting full-tilt in the direction the other girl had come from.

The sounds of conflict reaches them as they approach, getting louder and more chaotic the closer they get – and by the time they sprint around the final corner, everything is a cacophony of shouting and screaming and the whoosh of flames and the crackle of fire as the buildings around them burn and the villagers all try to flee or fight back against the wall of advancing Fire Nation soldiers.

Sokka’s soulmate has changed his approach a little, since the South Pole.

There, the guy offered to leave the village alone in exchange for Aang being handed over. Here, he’s apparently decided to go with the “Raze first, ask questions later” approach.

And it is him.

There was a brief moment that Sokka, taking in the destruction and fear all around him in the decimated village square, had thought it was a different contingent. After all – what are the odds that the exact same group of Fire Nation soldiers would find them, when the entire country must be out looking for Aang by now.

Only – nope. There he is. Right in the thick of it all; directing from the front. Raising his fists again to fire a new volley of flames at some innocent person’s home.

Sokka’s moving before he has time to think about it.

Suki’s moving with him, having seen the same threat he has; and together they throw themselves at Sokka’s soulmate.

Suki goes for his ankles and Sokka goes for his wrist, slicing his fans down at his arm as the fire bender brings it forward in a punch that, if allowed to go the whole way, will shoot a jet of fire out at the house he’s positioned in front of.

It would be nice to be able to say that between the two of them, Suki and Sokka have the guy beat – but the Fire Nation scumbag sees them coming just in time and aborts his firepunch, twisting and ducking to evade their synchronised attack, and then he’s spinning to face them and –

You’d think Sokka would get used to it.

The rush of warmth. The all-encompassing feeling of safety and joy and completeness. The yearning desire to reach for him; to draw him in close; never let him go.

But it catches him off guard every single time.

Their eyes lock, and the snarl on the fire bender’s face freezes in shock as he registers who he’s come face-to-face with, recognisable, apparently, even despite the costume and the facepaint – and that split second’s distraction is all the opening Suki needs.

She brings her fans down on the junction between the fire bender’s neck and shoulder, and if it weren’t for the thick armour, the blow would have been enough to take him out entirely.

As it is, it’s a strong enough impact in a vulnerable enough location that even with his stupid pointy armour, the blow is enough to have him staggering – and snapping out of the brief moment of shock that had temporarily frozen him.

“Duck!” Sokka yells, as the ‘bender somehow manages to catch his own stagger and turn the momentum from it into a wide arcing kick.

It’s a wildly inappropriate moment to have the thought, but – as the heat of flame rushes by over Sokka’s ducked head, he thinks to himself, I really have to learn this guy’s name.

It’s not like he’s had a chance to ask for it, after all. They kind of skipped over the whole polite introductions thing, when they first met. And then they were fighting and kidnapping children and rescuing said children and fleeing and ignoring the throbbing ache in their respective chests, and – yeah, there hasn’t exactly been many opportunities to swap names. But Sokka can’t keep calling the guy variations of the fire bender or the Fire Nation guy or Ponytail guy or, worst, his soulmate.

Of course, there aren’t exactly many other options, right now – but Sokka’s sure he could think of some if he’s given thirty seconds that are uninterrupted by either bolts of fire or soulmate nonsense.

The heat overhead dissipates, and Sokka has just long enough to look up and lock eyes with Suki – also straightening back up, unharmed, on the fire bender’s other side – when there’s a sudden tunnel of hurricane-like air that signals Aang’s arrival.

And where Aang goes…

There’s a furious yell and a splashing sound, and one of the other Fire Nation soldiers gets knocked clean off his kimono-rhino as Katara follows Aang right into the thick of things.

Things get a little crazy for a moment, after that.

Aang wastes no time and sends a blast of air at Sokka’s soulmate, who manages to keep his feet but goes skidding backwards through the dirt, and then Sokka’s ducking as some other nameless fire bender punches a blast right at his face, and Suki’s similarly engaged by another enemy soldier, and then they’re back to back and fighting with a surprising amount of synchronicity, all those hours spent sparring together paying off quite nicely.

Sokka tries to keep track of everyone, but there’s dust and smoke in the air and hostile soldiers in his face, and its impossible to keep his eyes on everyone. He fleetingly catches sight of Katara, sending a splash of water at a burning doorway for long enough that those trapped inside the building are able to rush out, and then Suki’s spinning and Sokka’s spinning with her, mirroring each other’s movements like two fish in a shoal, ducking under the blast of fire that comes flying at them.

Aang, Sokka only spots in brief increments. He’s here, then there, then up there, then over there – a flurry of movement, like a leaf in a windstorm. Sokka’s soulmate is on his tail every time – a blast of fire here, a plume of it there; a fireball sent chasing Aang up there; a sweep of fire over there. At one point, he manages to clamber atop a riderless kimono-rhino, kicking the beast into a charge that Sokka has to look away from as he leaps over a blanket of flame that would otherwise have taken him out at the ankles.

It’s messy and chaotic and Sokka can’t fucking see, and the only thing he’s able to keep track of successfully is the press of Suki against him – her arm against his; her shoulder knocking into his as they duck an attack; her foot in his cupped hands as he gives her a boost to swipe her fans down at the enemy from a height; his spine pressed against hers as they cover each other’s backs and face out at their attackers.

They get one moment of unexpected respite when a fireball hits the ground right in front of them and blasts them both backwards to land in a tangle of limbs atop each other.    

Suki wastes no time.

“Him?” she asks, panting from exertion as she extracts herself from Sokka’s lanky limbs, and there’s the incredulous disbelief she should have had when Sokka first revealed his soulmate’s occupation. “That asshole? Really?”

“Apparently,” Sokka grouses, clambering back to his feet with cranky gracelessness, and he should panic about her working out who his soulmate is –

(He’d told her, of course, that his soulmate had been the one to lead the attack on the Southern Water Tribe and kidnap Aang, but telling her that in a burst of emotion when the guy was nowhere nearby is one thing; having her come face to face with him while he’s attacking her village is quite another thing entirely)

– but he’s far too busy trying to prevent her town from burning down and trying to make sure Aang and Katara don’t get hurt to have time to panic.

“Ugh,” Suki says, with feeling – and then immediately proves why she’s so rapidly become one of Sokka’s favourite people in the world when she follows up with a sympathetic pat on the arm and a rueful “You poor guy.”

No distrust. No anger at Sokka for being soulmated to the person currently trying to burn her village to the ground. No shifting of her weight as she moves into a braced stance in case he suddenly turns on her.

But no pity, either. And no hollow attempt at making it seem less bad than it is.

Just frank, rueful sympathy.

“Yeah,” Sokka agrees, and then sends her a grin as he lifts his fans in readiness. “Wanna see if we can knock him off that stupid kimono-rhino of his?”

Suki – dreamgirl that she is, and ugh, why couldn’t she have been his soulmate? – mirrors his grin and sinks into a fighting stance.

“Do I ever,” she says, and then they’re launching in tandem from their hiding place, and attacking Sokka’s soulmate in perfect unison.

…

Against all odds, the Kyoshi Warriors are… winning.

They shouldn’t be. The Fire Nation soldiers outnumber them quite substantially, and that’s not even mentioning the literal firepower one side has that the other doesn’t.

But it’s a testament to their skill and ability to turn an opponent’s strength against them that the Kyoshi Warriors actually have the fire benders on the back foot.

But even winning, the Warriors have taken some substantial damages.

There are injured Fire Nation soldiers, yes – but there are also injured Kyoshi Warriors; not to mention that practically their whole town is on fire.

It’s Katara who suggests fleeing.

Or – no, that’s not fair. It wouldn’t be fleeing. It would be a strategic retreat, designed to draw the Fire Nation soldiers away from the town.

It just feels like fleeing.

But as much as Sokka hates it… Katara’s right.

It’s Aang that the Fire Nation are after. If Aang leaves, then Sokka’s soulmate and all his well-behaved little pet soldiers will follow, and Suki and her people will be left alone. Will be safe.

Or they can stay, and keep fighting, and maybe they win or maybe the soldiers call in more reinforcements from their ship, but either way, more Warriors will get injured and more houses will burn down, and – Spirits, Katara’s right; drawing them away is the best course of action.

That doesn’t mean Sokka doesn’t hesitate, though.

His soulmate is still here – somewhere in the smog. What if he doesn’t see Aang leaving? What if he does, but chooses not to give chase immediately? What if he decides to punish the people of Kyoshi for housing the Avatar for nearly a week? What if he does chase them, but they’re too fast so he turns around and comes back to Kyoshi to get information out of the people here on where Aang’s going next?

“Sokka, we’ll be fine,” Suki says, apparently reading all his thoughts on his face.

“But what if – ” he starts to ask, and then Suki grabs him by the front of his uniform and hauls him in, and he barely has time to squawk in surprise before she’s pressing her lips to his cheek in a brief but fierce kiss.

"One for the road," she says, pulling away with a small smile as Sokka gapes at her, shocked. "To tide us over, til we get our respective soulmate nonsense sorted out.”

Her eyes are reflecting the flames from the burning building behind Sokka. They’re all shades of gold and orange and yellow, and they look like they themselves are on fire. He wonders if his look the same.

Suki huffs a laugh at him, and shoves at his chest.

“Go,” she says, and Sokka hears Appa’s bellow as the skybison approaches. “And who knows, maybe I’ll see you out there,” she adds, her golden eyes glinting playfully. “I think the Kyoshi Warriors have sat out of this war for long enough.”

There’s a loud thud and another bellow, and then Katara’s yelling Sokka’s name and Suki’s shoving at him again and it really is the best course of action, so Sokka follows the momentum of Suki’s shove and goes – and the second he takes his first step towards Appa, his chest flares with the increasingly familiar pain of walking away from his soulmate.

At least he doesn’t have to worry about whether or not the guy will know that Sokka, Aang, and Katara have left. The first two times one of them walked away from the other, both of them felt the pain in their chest. This third occasion should be no different, Sokka thinks as he breathes through the flaring pain. His soulmate should feel Sokka leaving, even if he doesn’t see Appa’s departure through the smoke.

“Retreat!” Sokka hears suddenly, confirming his theory almost immediately. “Back to the ship! Retreat!”

The voice would be recognisable to Sokka’s ear even if it weren’t the one shouting orders to the rest of the soldiers, and Sokka puts his head down and pushes through the pain, hastening to Appa with barely a stumble.

He makes it to the bison and clambers up into the saddle, and then Aang’s landing on Appa’s head with a twirl of his glider and shouting “Yip yip!” and Appa is rising into the air with a groan, and Sokka’s too focussed on peering over the edge of the saddle at the battleground below –

(looking for his soulmate amongst the retreating soldiers; looking for Suki amongst the Warriors giving chase; looking at the burning buildings and wondering how many people were caught inside them)

– to notice Katara coming up beside him.

“Are you hurt?” she asks, startling him, and when he blinks his gaze away from the rapidly shrinking battlefield below them and looks over to her in surprise, he finds her looking at his chest with a worried frown and hands that are hovering but not touching.

His chest, which he’s rubbing at with a clenched fist.

“Oh, uh – no,” he says, dropping his fist. Not like its rubbing was helping, anyway. The pain in his chest is hot and bright and feels like a jagged tear beneath his ribcage. “Just – winded,” he elaborates, lying through his teeth. “What about you two – are you hurt?”

He wants to know, obviously – but he also wants to distract her. Get her focussed on something else so he can focus on evening out his jagged breathing as he waits for the pain to pass. It won’t – not fully. He knows that already. It’s been over a fortnight since his soulmate first walked away from him and the pain bloomed in his chest, and in that whole time, it’s only ever dulled to a lowgrade ache. It’s not once gone away entirely. Sokka’s starting to think it never will. Especially if he keeps coming face to face with his damn soulmate, and keeps having to walk away (or run away, or fly away) from him. The agony always flares brightest in those first few steps, and then burns like a fire with new fuel until it starts to drop down to something more like smoking coals.

“We’re fine,” Katara assures, and then something past Sokka catches her eye. “Oh – but the village!” she cries, coming to stand next to him and looking out over the edge of the saddle. “It’s destroyed!”

It is, indeed, pretty dire down there. Sokka doesn’t think there’s even one building that’s not currently on fire. He presses his lips together in an effort to hold his self-recriminations in. Tui and La, he should have had them leave days ago. If they had, Suki’s village wouldn’t be alight right now.

“I have an idea!” Aang calls from up on Appa’s head – and angles Appa over towards the big body of water that hides a giant bloodthirsty eel-thing in its depths.

A giant bloodthirsty eel that doubles as a firehose, apparently, Sokka thinks minutes later, as the Unagi showers Kyoshi Village with water, dousing the flames faster than a team of water benders would have been able to.

And below them – bobbing on the surface of that pristine, glinting water – is a small Fire Nation ship that Sokka knows, in his bones, is going to dog their every step from here to the Northern Water Tribe.

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