Passages: Chapter 26
Ish. I feel guilty for posting my last chapter of my Sokka/dangerous ladies fict to ff.net without posting it here first. So here's the latest chapter of that monstrous sequal to "Prison Conversations".
Chapter 26
Sokka felt that damned itch, stretching from shoulder to groin, that suggested he was missing something important because he was too blamed lazy or stupid to be paying attention. It was a feeling he’d accepted long before he’d entered puberty, before even making a distinction between awareness of outside stimulus and.something else, something he’d never really admitted to anyone.
And, admittedly, there were times he’d ignored the itch, rolling over after giving himself a good scratch and a stretch and ignoring everything else.
For the child that was Sokka, most of the time it really didn’t seem to matter that he ignored the itch. Still, for the burgeoning consciousness that was Sokka then, the question of costs was largely irrelevant. Sokka’s consciousness did not feel anywhere near so cavalier.
Even so, mindful spirits probably bemoaned the fate of the world at that point. The avatar - idiot child of unkown parentage more prone to start than to stand. Decades upon decades later, the bending masters were so intent upon their own culturally-circumscribed worlds and distinguishing themselves from one another… And where did that leave everyone else, anyway?
Sokka’d been of such a mindframe on a mid-summer’s day only to be confronted, prebuscent that he was then, with a sword at his neck while his beloved mother was dragged into the sleeping chamber by a pair of helmeted figures, pleading and struggling in ways he desparately did not want to remember. His sister, a girl-child barely recognizable as such - and later he’d thanked the spirits for as much - had been tossed into his sleeping alcove with as much compunction as a puppy, the two of them warned to keep silent on their lives….
Sokka had clutched Katara’s head to his chest fervently then, blinding her to the visions forced upon his own eyes. He’d never counted the times bile had risen in his throat, swallowing hard to keep his voice clear to murmur comforting phrases as she sobbed in terror, his own eyes transfixed on the spectacle before him. And there were some things that, despite being the son of a story-teller, never did meet the light of day.
It was more than a decade later before Sokka could loose those particular visions to anyone else. And several years more before he could speak as much to Zuko. By then, the older boy didn’t need Sokka’s pro-forma forgiveness.
By then, that was largely the point. And that, of course, was another time, some years before our current story.
It was, however, the same kind of itch crawling along his body on another midsummer’s day. This time, however, as he woke from a doze beneath the tree to observe Prince Zuko and Jeong-Jeong conversing quietly some few feet away he could see no particular reason why his intuition might be on alert.
Zuko had shown he was reasonably comfortable with Jeong-Jeong, and Sokka had not been blind to the blandishments between the two of forming some kind of alliance. Given his previous experience with Jeong-Jeong this probably was not a bad thing, from his own perspective. Sokka did not much wonder what Zuko’s perspective might have been. He liked to hope that Zuko had evolved to something near his own plane of perception. Or, at least, a good few rungs above worrying about Fire Nation dominance and pleasing his father at any cost. Sokka was arrogant that way.
And the truth was he longed to return to his friends, longed to rest in the curve of Katara’s embrace while she hounded him for being an idiot and getting caught in the first place. Zuko didn’t understand - perhaps couldn’t understand given his own family situation - but nothing was really more important than the connection between family.
He had begun to suspect that his appreciation for and gratitude to Zuko had warmed into something very like friendship on his part. And he remembered Aang’s words about Fire Nation friends and their closeness.
But this was Prince Zuko he was thinking about. It was his highness’s sense of honor that had bound them together thus far, he knew. So again he chose to ignore his intuition’s twitchiness.
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“So, you’re leaving?” Zuko kept his voice even, as if this were the most logical progression of moves on the game board, as if he’d forseen it all along. He made sure that there was nothing to suggest he’d expected anything otherwise in the tone of his voice. Neutrality was something he understood, even if it was not something he’d ever managed to convey. This time he strove to infuse it into every fiber of his being when Sokka suggested that it was, perhaps, time for him tomove on alone.
“Yeah, well, it’s not like there’s any reason I should hang around. I mean, I’ve got places to go, people to see…” Sokka tossed his bangs back over his head, having yet to fully secure them again after getting dumped in the stream by Zuko. “Don’t guess you got any problems with that, right Master Jeong-Jeong?”
The white-haired soldier shook his head briefly, interested to see it had been the Tribesman who had been first to push the issue after all.
“Right. Well then, you know, maybe we should talk about this.” Zuko shifted uncomfortably, thinking that perhaps he was more fully aware of what “this” meant than Sokka.
And that, he realized, would be a first. No, it wasn’t likely that Sokka hadn’t already processed through the mills of his mind all the possible permutations of their parting. That he’d opted to do so anyway made the decision easier for Zuko, in some ways. Oddly enough, it still bothered him.
“Yeah, about that. I mean, I wouldn’t just abandon you flat, but with Jeong-Jeong here you’ve probably got a lot better chance of finding your uncle than you would with me, right?” Sokka spoke quickly, wanting to get over the hurdles of goodbye as quickly as possible. Things had changed even since they’d left the prison together little more than a week ago. They had become comrades, hadn’t they?
Zuko hesitated, catching the master fire-bender’s eye. He hadn’t actually gotten an answer to his own similar query just minutes ago. Nor had he actually voiced his desire to find Iroh. Ah, thank you, Sokka, for boxing me in so neatly. Did you really mean to define my options so closely?
“Doesn’t matter. I think you’ve gotten me as far as I needed you to anyway,” he kept his own voice clipped. “What was it your father said? May we not meet again on the field of conflict…”
“Except, perhaps, as allies?”
“At least, not as enemies.”
Again, blue eyes met gold. Sunlight glancing off ice cliffs. After a long moment, both spoke at once…
“Mind that shoulder of yours - I’d hate to think I wasted my efforts.”
“I’ll bet you could weasel your way into filling your rucksack before you go…”
Sokka offered a lopsided grin to Zuko’s smirk
Both found themselves chuckling as they turned to Jeong-Jeong. It was Zuko’s turn to speak. “So Master. Will you allow one to go where he wills, knowing that he means to end the Fire Nation’s dominion? And will you allow the other to stay, knowing he seeks a road to greater Fire Nation glory, even if it means the fall of the current Fire Lord?”
Jeong-Jeong’s wasn’t the only breath to be drawn in as a hiss on these words.
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The warehouse had proven to be at least as intrigueing as the Water Tribe boat moored at the pier. Mostly because it was empty, and yet workmen were assiduously mending a large hole in the rear wall as if it held all the riches of the Earth Kingdom. Toph kicked at the deck of the pier outside the warehouse’s front door in frustration.
“I can’t get squat from this stupid boardwalk, except that the place is empty as an Old Kingdom tomb. Don’t know about the rest of you though, but I smell chicken feathers and chicken poo. That and smoke, not just a campfire, but from water pipes at least. This place is used as a sporting venue.” She should know. Earthbending tournaments often took place in spaces shared with other, less savory altercations.
Sokka’s guess on cock-fighting hadn’t been off the mark after all.
Aang’s nose twitched. As the air-bender, he probably should have picked it up first, but he wasn’t surprised that Toph’s nose was as sharp as her other senses, all compensating for her missing vision.
“That doesn’t explain the need for repairs to that back wall,” Katara said, elbowing her way past the guard hired by the chandler with the confidence of a master waterbender on what might be called home turf. “Iroh, am I wrong or does the debris they’re carting away look charred?”
“Charred with precision, since you ask, my dear girl.” He answered with a smile. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”
“Okay. So we’re already assuming that Sokka’s traveling with someone from the Fire Nation. Why shouldn’t that person be a fire-bender?” Aang asked, leading the others back out the door and around the building to the alley where he could perform his avatar-connectedness routine again. He fully expected as clear of a response as that which had led Katara, Sokka and him to Appa and Momo in the swamp all those months ago.
“Now see, this is where things completely stop making sense,” Katara protested. “Okay, Sokka might just trust someone from the Fire Nation if they’d been prisoners together. But would he trust that same person if he found them on a Water Tribe boat? Not likely! And if they were prisoners together, how’d they get the boat? As for a fire-bender? You know how hard it was for Sokka to trust bending at all, let alone fire-bending.”
She turned marose eyes upon Aang. “I swear, Aang, if you hadn’t sensed him close by, I simply could not believe this, any of it!”
Aang gave a cheeky grin. “Ah, c’mon, Katara! You’re looking at it all wrong. Only Sokka could possibly hook up a Water Tribe boat and a fire-bender together. And when the time comes, it will make sense that only Sokka would have found reason to leave the warehouse by a backdoor made by fire-bending.”
“I know this sounds really scary,” Toph said as she followed. “But he actually makes a lot of sense putting it like that.”
“I know,” Katara bemoaned. “The more absurd it sounds the more likely it appears that any of us would be involved. And Sokka’s the worst of all because the way he thinks he would actually be able to see all this falling together and accept it. Oh, he claims to be the scientist and pessimist among us, but who is the one who comes up with the most hare-brained schemes?”
“Um. Well, yeah, it’s Sokka.” Aang admitted. “But usually it’s because we can’t think of anything else. Katara, any of us can come up with the logical and the obvious solutions. We all know it takes Sokka’s odd genius to find ways out of the impossible. Does it really matter?”
Iroh had, as usual, followed along, listening to these children chatter as they worked their way along the trail much as he had observed his nephew, all those months ago, work his way through the logic of following their own trail. It amused him, mildly, to find that many of their escapes had been through happenstance rather than deliberate intent, while others had verged on brilliance worthy of the White Lotus Society. As one of the few bending members of that group, it did not altogether surprise him that these schemes inevitably had their genesis in the mind of the lone non-bender among them.
It wasn’t that bending lacked genius. Not at all. It was patently obvious that Katara and Toph before him were geniuses in their own bending disciplines, just as Iroh himself was a fire-bender extraordinaire. That he was also strategically brilliant had been made apparent during his military career, and there were many who wondered how that genius could have been extinguished by the death of his son at Ba Sing Se.
Iroh never saw fit to correct history’s perception. Should history need to remember him, enough would be found in the Society’s chronicles. In the meantime, he had other concerns.
The young Avatar knelt on one knee as he brought his hand to the earth, eyes closed and face set. Mere seconds passed before his eyes opened and his expression expressed triumph.
“I’ve found him! He’s very close!” Then Aang’s eyes clouded a bit. “His - I don’t know how better to describe it than, his signature - is all confused with another image, and that just doesn’t make sense.”
Toph harrumphed. “Not so strange. It’s probably this fire-bender he’s been traveling with. There signals are all confused cause they’ve been so close together so long.” She patted Aang on the shoulder consolingly. “You’re not blind, so it makes sense that your perception wouldn’t be as sharp as mine.”
“Yeah. Right.” Aang tried to follow her logic, and failed miserably, since he was following a trail beyond Toph’s senses, blind or otherwise. It certainly didn’t seem worth arguing. And she was probably right as to the identity that had merged with Sokka’s.
“The circus freak talked about ‘auras’,” Katara mused aloud. “Do you suppose there was some credence to that?”
“Bullshit.” Said Toph. “Aura talk is all about shiny and colorful projections people have around each themselves. If that was real why would only wackos be able to see it?”
Aang kept silent. He was almost ready to swear he could see auras, but maybe that was an Avatar thing, which wouldn’t detract from Toph’s thesis. Avatar stuff was all weird anyway. In any case, he saw no point in pushing yet another sense the Avatar had over everyone else, especially one that he held over Toph. “And he certainly didn’t want to be considered a ‘wacko’.”
“Haven’t we strayed from our objective” Iroh asked placidly. “Aang, to where do we go from here?”
Chapter 26
Sokka felt that damned itch, stretching from shoulder to groin, that suggested he was missing something important because he was too blamed lazy or stupid to be paying attention. It was a feeling he’d accepted long before he’d entered puberty, before even making a distinction between awareness of outside stimulus and.something else, something he’d never really admitted to anyone.
And, admittedly, there were times he’d ignored the itch, rolling over after giving himself a good scratch and a stretch and ignoring everything else.
For the child that was Sokka, most of the time it really didn’t seem to matter that he ignored the itch. Still, for the burgeoning consciousness that was Sokka then, the question of costs was largely irrelevant. Sokka’s consciousness did not feel anywhere near so cavalier.
Even so, mindful spirits probably bemoaned the fate of the world at that point. The avatar - idiot child of unkown parentage more prone to start than to stand. Decades upon decades later, the bending masters were so intent upon their own culturally-circumscribed worlds and distinguishing themselves from one another… And where did that leave everyone else, anyway?
Sokka’d been of such a mindframe on a mid-summer’s day only to be confronted, prebuscent that he was then, with a sword at his neck while his beloved mother was dragged into the sleeping chamber by a pair of helmeted figures, pleading and struggling in ways he desparately did not want to remember. His sister, a girl-child barely recognizable as such - and later he’d thanked the spirits for as much - had been tossed into his sleeping alcove with as much compunction as a puppy, the two of them warned to keep silent on their lives….
Sokka had clutched Katara’s head to his chest fervently then, blinding her to the visions forced upon his own eyes. He’d never counted the times bile had risen in his throat, swallowing hard to keep his voice clear to murmur comforting phrases as she sobbed in terror, his own eyes transfixed on the spectacle before him. And there were some things that, despite being the son of a story-teller, never did meet the light of day.
It was more than a decade later before Sokka could loose those particular visions to anyone else. And several years more before he could speak as much to Zuko. By then, the older boy didn’t need Sokka’s pro-forma forgiveness.
By then, that was largely the point. And that, of course, was another time, some years before our current story.
It was, however, the same kind of itch crawling along his body on another midsummer’s day. This time, however, as he woke from a doze beneath the tree to observe Prince Zuko and Jeong-Jeong conversing quietly some few feet away he could see no particular reason why his intuition might be on alert.
Zuko had shown he was reasonably comfortable with Jeong-Jeong, and Sokka had not been blind to the blandishments between the two of forming some kind of alliance. Given his previous experience with Jeong-Jeong this probably was not a bad thing, from his own perspective. Sokka did not much wonder what Zuko’s perspective might have been. He liked to hope that Zuko had evolved to something near his own plane of perception. Or, at least, a good few rungs above worrying about Fire Nation dominance and pleasing his father at any cost. Sokka was arrogant that way.
And the truth was he longed to return to his friends, longed to rest in the curve of Katara’s embrace while she hounded him for being an idiot and getting caught in the first place. Zuko didn’t understand - perhaps couldn’t understand given his own family situation - but nothing was really more important than the connection between family.
He had begun to suspect that his appreciation for and gratitude to Zuko had warmed into something very like friendship on his part. And he remembered Aang’s words about Fire Nation friends and their closeness.
But this was Prince Zuko he was thinking about. It was his highness’s sense of honor that had bound them together thus far, he knew. So again he chose to ignore his intuition’s twitchiness.
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“So, you’re leaving?” Zuko kept his voice even, as if this were the most logical progression of moves on the game board, as if he’d forseen it all along. He made sure that there was nothing to suggest he’d expected anything otherwise in the tone of his voice. Neutrality was something he understood, even if it was not something he’d ever managed to convey. This time he strove to infuse it into every fiber of his being when Sokka suggested that it was, perhaps, time for him tomove on alone.
“Yeah, well, it’s not like there’s any reason I should hang around. I mean, I’ve got places to go, people to see…” Sokka tossed his bangs back over his head, having yet to fully secure them again after getting dumped in the stream by Zuko. “Don’t guess you got any problems with that, right Master Jeong-Jeong?”
The white-haired soldier shook his head briefly, interested to see it had been the Tribesman who had been first to push the issue after all.
“Right. Well then, you know, maybe we should talk about this.” Zuko shifted uncomfortably, thinking that perhaps he was more fully aware of what “this” meant than Sokka.
And that, he realized, would be a first. No, it wasn’t likely that Sokka hadn’t already processed through the mills of his mind all the possible permutations of their parting. That he’d opted to do so anyway made the decision easier for Zuko, in some ways. Oddly enough, it still bothered him.
“Yeah, about that. I mean, I wouldn’t just abandon you flat, but with Jeong-Jeong here you’ve probably got a lot better chance of finding your uncle than you would with me, right?” Sokka spoke quickly, wanting to get over the hurdles of goodbye as quickly as possible. Things had changed even since they’d left the prison together little more than a week ago. They had become comrades, hadn’t they?
Zuko hesitated, catching the master fire-bender’s eye. He hadn’t actually gotten an answer to his own similar query just minutes ago. Nor had he actually voiced his desire to find Iroh. Ah, thank you, Sokka, for boxing me in so neatly. Did you really mean to define my options so closely?
“Doesn’t matter. I think you’ve gotten me as far as I needed you to anyway,” he kept his own voice clipped. “What was it your father said? May we not meet again on the field of conflict…”
“Except, perhaps, as allies?”
“At least, not as enemies.”
Again, blue eyes met gold. Sunlight glancing off ice cliffs. After a long moment, both spoke at once…
“Mind that shoulder of yours - I’d hate to think I wasted my efforts.”
“I’ll bet you could weasel your way into filling your rucksack before you go…”
Sokka offered a lopsided grin to Zuko’s smirk
Both found themselves chuckling as they turned to Jeong-Jeong. It was Zuko’s turn to speak. “So Master. Will you allow one to go where he wills, knowing that he means to end the Fire Nation’s dominion? And will you allow the other to stay, knowing he seeks a road to greater Fire Nation glory, even if it means the fall of the current Fire Lord?”
Jeong-Jeong’s wasn’t the only breath to be drawn in as a hiss on these words.
------------------------
The warehouse had proven to be at least as intrigueing as the Water Tribe boat moored at the pier. Mostly because it was empty, and yet workmen were assiduously mending a large hole in the rear wall as if it held all the riches of the Earth Kingdom. Toph kicked at the deck of the pier outside the warehouse’s front door in frustration.
“I can’t get squat from this stupid boardwalk, except that the place is empty as an Old Kingdom tomb. Don’t know about the rest of you though, but I smell chicken feathers and chicken poo. That and smoke, not just a campfire, but from water pipes at least. This place is used as a sporting venue.” She should know. Earthbending tournaments often took place in spaces shared with other, less savory altercations.
Sokka’s guess on cock-fighting hadn’t been off the mark after all.
Aang’s nose twitched. As the air-bender, he probably should have picked it up first, but he wasn’t surprised that Toph’s nose was as sharp as her other senses, all compensating for her missing vision.
“That doesn’t explain the need for repairs to that back wall,” Katara said, elbowing her way past the guard hired by the chandler with the confidence of a master waterbender on what might be called home turf. “Iroh, am I wrong or does the debris they’re carting away look charred?”
“Charred with precision, since you ask, my dear girl.” He answered with a smile. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”
“Okay. So we’re already assuming that Sokka’s traveling with someone from the Fire Nation. Why shouldn’t that person be a fire-bender?” Aang asked, leading the others back out the door and around the building to the alley where he could perform his avatar-connectedness routine again. He fully expected as clear of a response as that which had led Katara, Sokka and him to Appa and Momo in the swamp all those months ago.
“Now see, this is where things completely stop making sense,” Katara protested. “Okay, Sokka might just trust someone from the Fire Nation if they’d been prisoners together. But would he trust that same person if he found them on a Water Tribe boat? Not likely! And if they were prisoners together, how’d they get the boat? As for a fire-bender? You know how hard it was for Sokka to trust bending at all, let alone fire-bending.”
She turned marose eyes upon Aang. “I swear, Aang, if you hadn’t sensed him close by, I simply could not believe this, any of it!”
Aang gave a cheeky grin. “Ah, c’mon, Katara! You’re looking at it all wrong. Only Sokka could possibly hook up a Water Tribe boat and a fire-bender together. And when the time comes, it will make sense that only Sokka would have found reason to leave the warehouse by a backdoor made by fire-bending.”
“I know this sounds really scary,” Toph said as she followed. “But he actually makes a lot of sense putting it like that.”
“I know,” Katara bemoaned. “The more absurd it sounds the more likely it appears that any of us would be involved. And Sokka’s the worst of all because the way he thinks he would actually be able to see all this falling together and accept it. Oh, he claims to be the scientist and pessimist among us, but who is the one who comes up with the most hare-brained schemes?”
“Um. Well, yeah, it’s Sokka.” Aang admitted. “But usually it’s because we can’t think of anything else. Katara, any of us can come up with the logical and the obvious solutions. We all know it takes Sokka’s odd genius to find ways out of the impossible. Does it really matter?”
Iroh had, as usual, followed along, listening to these children chatter as they worked their way along the trail much as he had observed his nephew, all those months ago, work his way through the logic of following their own trail. It amused him, mildly, to find that many of their escapes had been through happenstance rather than deliberate intent, while others had verged on brilliance worthy of the White Lotus Society. As one of the few bending members of that group, it did not altogether surprise him that these schemes inevitably had their genesis in the mind of the lone non-bender among them.
It wasn’t that bending lacked genius. Not at all. It was patently obvious that Katara and Toph before him were geniuses in their own bending disciplines, just as Iroh himself was a fire-bender extraordinaire. That he was also strategically brilliant had been made apparent during his military career, and there were many who wondered how that genius could have been extinguished by the death of his son at Ba Sing Se.
Iroh never saw fit to correct history’s perception. Should history need to remember him, enough would be found in the Society’s chronicles. In the meantime, he had other concerns.
The young Avatar knelt on one knee as he brought his hand to the earth, eyes closed and face set. Mere seconds passed before his eyes opened and his expression expressed triumph.
“I’ve found him! He’s very close!” Then Aang’s eyes clouded a bit. “His - I don’t know how better to describe it than, his signature - is all confused with another image, and that just doesn’t make sense.”
Toph harrumphed. “Not so strange. It’s probably this fire-bender he’s been traveling with. There signals are all confused cause they’ve been so close together so long.” She patted Aang on the shoulder consolingly. “You’re not blind, so it makes sense that your perception wouldn’t be as sharp as mine.”
“Yeah. Right.” Aang tried to follow her logic, and failed miserably, since he was following a trail beyond Toph’s senses, blind or otherwise. It certainly didn’t seem worth arguing. And she was probably right as to the identity that had merged with Sokka’s.
“The circus freak talked about ‘auras’,” Katara mused aloud. “Do you suppose there was some credence to that?”
“Bullshit.” Said Toph. “Aura talk is all about shiny and colorful projections people have around each themselves. If that was real why would only wackos be able to see it?”
Aang kept silent. He was almost ready to swear he could see auras, but maybe that was an Avatar thing, which wouldn’t detract from Toph’s thesis. Avatar stuff was all weird anyway. In any case, he saw no point in pushing yet another sense the Avatar had over everyone else, especially one that he held over Toph. “And he certainly didn’t want to be considered a ‘wacko’.”
“Haven’t we strayed from our objective” Iroh asked placidly. “Aang, to where do we go from here?”