Avatar fic: A Good Proposal After All
Title: A Good Proposal After All
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I can't say that I own anything here. Oh wait . . . I do own several of those little ketchup packets. I haven't had any fries to use them on . . .
Rating: PG
Summary: Toph gives Katara some Toph love (Toph . . . tough get it? I know. Puns are bad) Eighth in the Proposal series.
Author's Notes: First, Kimberly T., the bit about Pakku is for you. I'd just written him off, because we know he likes Katara too much to let a whole tribe walk all over her, so I'd been kind of thinking he'd slunk back to the Northern Water Tribe. She called me on it, so I . . . sadly . . . was forced to give him a tragic death-by-illness. I like the guy, but I can't leave him around or he'd be either a glaring loose end, or just someone totally OOC. Second, I have received requests for Toph, I hereby give you Toph. It's pretty dialogue-heavy, but Katara needs someone around she feels she can trust isn't pussy-footing about, but giving her the straight goods. That's going to be Toph's role, and if that means she's talking more than smacking people with boulders, well, let's pretend she's developed some sensitivity in the years she's been acting as a diplomat with Aang.
They'd been out of contact with everyone for months. Heck, they'd had only sporadic contact with everyone for three years now, Toph reflected. She an Aang had been travelling the Earth Kingdom, bringing news of the new peace to everyone, putting down incipient rebellions before they started and finding ways to get the parts of the Earth Kingdom that had been colonised by the Fire Nation to reach some sort of peaceful equilibrium.
After Ozai's defeat, Zuko had wound up stuck in the Fire Nation, having to bring the aggressive citizens to heel and bring the country back to a more peaceful state. Undoing a century of propaganda that the other nations were inferior was going to be a lifelong project in itself, let alone being the ruler of a nation.
Suki and her warriors had returned to Kyoshi to return the island to the state it was in before Aang had first visited four years before and Sokka had decided to split his time between there and the South Pole. Katara had chosen to return home.
In spite of the clear affection between them, she an Aang had both decided that it was just too difficult to try a relationship at that time. Aang was just barely thirteen, while Katara was fifteen and the age gap just felt like too much at that time. Also, of course, Aang had to travel, and Katara had wanted nothing more than to take a break. Water was malleable and flexible, but the family that they had built travelling with the Avatar was breaking up, and Katara needed that underlying stability of family.
Which had left only Toph. She'd had nothing to go home to, except parents who still, still, thought their little blind girl was going to trip over thin air and die horribly. She'd destroyed the back yard in front of them, and her mother had simply started wailing about how Toph must feel faint with all the effort of bending and did she want to lie down now sweetums?
So she'd left with Aang.
It was amazing. Even more now that the war was over. They could go anywhere and see everything. And Toph loved every second of it. Aang took her to the mountains and she was able to feel the way the rocks went all the way down to the centre of the earth. They'd learned sandbending together, discovering in the process that the sandbenders concealed one of several enclaves of hiding airbenders.
There had been a massacre of the Air Nomads, but some had escaped from every temple. They'd gone into hiding all over the world, only now willing to gradually make contact with the Avatar. The great masters of airbending had been lost in those early years, so the various groups of airbenders had had to find ways to train without having anything to guide them.
Hidden in the Earth Kingdom were small groups of airbenders who had developed a strange technique to bending that bore a close resemblance to earthbending, hidden within the city in the North Pole were airbenders whose techniques weren't the hit and run style that Aang had been taught, but the circular styles prevalent in waterbending.
These various groups were in the process of sending emissaries to the Fire Nation. Word of Zuko's upcoming wedding had reached Aang and Toph, which was almost a miracle considering how much they travelled. These strange hybrid remnants of Aang's people were planning to reveal themselves at the wedding, in a public place and to show no hard feelings between themselves and the new Fire Lord.
Toph sharpened her hearing in the direction of the other two people on Appa's saddle. The woman was very anxious, especially since they had not heard any confirmation in any rumours or news about who Zuko was going to marry. They'd assumed it was Mai, but there was no way of knowing. Letters trying to catch up with them had had a way of getting lost as they were just passed through too many hands.
Still, they had to hurry to get to the capital in time. They'd been tracking the last of the airbender rumours when they found her.
There were airbenders somewhere among all three nations, including the Fire Nation. Hiding in plain sight on a few of the southernmost islands of Zuko's country, were a few small enclaves. As with the other groups, they'd adapted firebending styles to airbending. They'd protected themselves a little differently there however, given the iron-fisted control of the Fire Lords of the past century. Instead of simply hiding, they'd arranged, gradually, to work some of their people into places high in the administration.
Then, they'd finally worked one of theirs to the highest possible point. An airbender had sacrificed her happiness to sit on the throne of the Fire Lady.
After the mess where she'd been forced to assassinate her own father-in-law to save her son, Ursa had fled, mere days pregnant with her third child and not knowing it at the time, to one of the airbender enclaves in the south. In a way it was lucky she had, as Zuko's youngest sister, Malai, turned out to be an airbender.
Toph had found them, and she and Aang had talked Ursa into returning with them to the Fire Nation capital. Malai was eager to meet her big brother, Ursa was terrified. She hid it well, but Toph, when she was on the ground, anyways, could hear the woman's heart pounding almost constantly.
"There it is!" Aang shouted from where he sat on Appa's head.
"Wow!" said Malai, who'd never been anywhere but the small village she'd been raised in. She chattered a mile a minute the whole approach to the palace, during the landing, the whole walk from the stables up to the main portals and didn't quiet down until they were almost to the throne room. Mercifully she fell silent then, and Toph was able to concentrate on Ursa's pounding heartbeat and the rest of her surroundings.
They entered the throne room, and Toph felt her eyebrows shoot up into her hairline. The formal introductions rattled on, and she was vaguely aware of Aang introducing Ursa and Malai to the court, and Zuko leaping to his feet, ignoring every protocol in the world as he rushed to his mother. Toph was far more interested in the fact that Katara was sitting on a small chair beside Zuko on the dais, and had been introduced as Zuko's wife-to-be.
It seemed like an eternity before she was able to pry herself and Katara away from the hullabaloo that the castle had become with the arrival of Dowager Fire Lady Ursa and Princess Malai. They were finally settled in a nook in the gardens reserved for the royal family, away from everything. "Spill, Sugar Queen."
"What?" Katara asked. That one response told Toph a lot. There was something seriously wrong. With Katara and with the whole situation.
"How in nine hells did you manage to wind up engaged to Sparky?" Toph demanded.
Her friend shifted around, a little uncomfortably, and said, "He contacted my father, and offered an . . . immense bride price. Dad accepted and . . . here I am."
Toph could feel her eyes bulging. "You just . . . went along with it? You're friends, sure, but what the hell are you thinking?"
"Zuko's court was pressuring him to get married," Katara said, shrugging. "He told me that if he had to marry right then, he wanted to marry someone he was at least friends with and that he thought could do the job of Fire Lady. Help him rule the Fire Nation." Toph caught the mutter she wasn't supposed to hear. "And I guess he didn't know about me."
So now they were on to whatever it was that was wrong with Katara. "What does that mean?"
"What does what mean?"
"You're still a bad liar, Sweetness. What does, 'I guess he didn't know about me,' mean?" Toph demanded.
Katara shifted around more, her heart rate sped up and she said, "Just . . . some things happened at home. I . . . changed." Truth. But a lie. She was trying very hard not to talk or even think about something.
"What things?"
"I just had a hard time adjusting to life at home after travelling with Aang and everything," Katara told her. Truth, and lie.
"You're hiding something," Toph told her. Maybe someone else would have tried to gently get the waterbender to let out what the problem was, but that wasn't Toph. She'd pry away at the problem until it opened up, like Momo with a tough-shelled nut.
The other woman seemed about to deny it, but something crumpled inside her, and Toph didn't need eyes to see it. That alone was worrisome. Katara never crumpled over anything, and certainly never to Toph. It just wasn't in her, or so Toph had thought. "I guess, you'll find out from someone else, anyhow," she said. "I just . . ." There was a long pause, and then Katara said, "I didn't fit in at home any more. The warriors and the benders from the North Pole all thought I was a silly little girl and that I couldn't, and shouldn't want to bend."
That wasn't all, but Toph couldn't help herself. "So you smacked 'em around to show 'em what for. Didn't that guy who trained you, Pakku wasn't it? Didn't he back you up?"
A sharp intake of breath that almost sounded like a sob came from Katara's mouth. "Pakku . . . You know they don't have the chicken-duck pox in the North Pole? They're so isolated from everything that they just don't have any exposure."
"So?" Toph asked. "Everyone gets it everywhere else. It's not a big deal."
"Not for children," Katara told her solemnly. "Children get it and it means a few spots and itchy places. If an adult gets it, it's a lot more serious. It kills adults."
Toph didn't need her to spell it out. "Pakku died from chicken-duck pox, didn't he?"
"Yes," Katara breathed. "I tried so hard. I tried everything I could think of and he just . . . faded away. Gran . . . I was there when Gran told him that she loved him, and then he was just . . . gone." She was shaking and Toph moved over and pulled her into a hug. She didn't do hugs, but this was a special occasion. "I sometimes wonder how different things would be if he'd been there to get those jerks in the tribe's warrior meetings to listen to me. To treat me like . . ."
She trailed off and Toph had the uncomfortable feeling that she was standing on a rock poking from the ground that was actually the peak of a volcano. There was more, just waiting under the surface, and it was going to explode in a big ball of lava. Toph wasn't the sort to be overcautious though, so she bulled forward. "So the men in your village were jerks. Why didn't you leave when the construction was done?" Toph demanded. "Twinkletoes and I would have been happy to have you."
"I couldn't have done that," Katara exclaimed. "Dad said they needed me in the healing huts-"
"Lie."
"He did!" Katara wasn't lying about that . . . which meant-
"They didn't need you there, did they?"
"Well . . . and he said we needed every tribe member to help get our numbers back up-"
"They didn't actually need you there, specifically, did they?" Toph asked dryly. "I hate to say it Sugar Queen, but I think your dad was manipulating you and guilting you into staying."
"I . . ." Once again, Katara trailed off, but Toph could almost hear the wheels grinding in her head.
"I don't really like this whole arranged marriage thing you have going with Sparky, Sweetness," Toph told her, "But it might be the best thing that happened to you anyhow. At least here you can mother a whole country, and kick ass with the best of them. It's like being Fire Lady is a custom-made position for you."
Toph felt the head motion that she'd learned meant someone was expressing exasperated disbelief by rolling their eyes. "Fire Lady? Custom-made for me?" Katara's voice certainly sounded skeptical. "Where do you get that?"
Counting off her fingers, Toph said, "First, you kept us all organised and moving, you kept the campsite together, made sure everyone did their chores, picked up the slack when they didn't, made Sokka wash his socks, kept us all motivated with all your speeches about saving the world and managed to keep a close enough eye on the big picture that you knew when to hand the reins over to Snoozles, Twinkletoes or Sparky if the situation needed it."
"It wasn't that-"
"I know none of the rest of us could have done it," Toph said over Katara's incipient objection that she hadn't been that important. "You also kicked butt as a waterbender, I know that because we've sparred enough for me to know that, put you next to a lake and me and you? We're pretty evenly matched, and I'm the Earth Rumble champion. I know what I'm talking about with butt-kicking."
"How-"
The pretty earthbender wasn't even close to done. Katara had always had this little bit of self-doubt, telling her she wasn't as good as she thought she was. Well, it was really annoying, particularly the fact that clearly Katara's family sucked as much as Toph's if they'd done this to her, and Toph wasn't going to be annoyed by something she could change. So she was changing it like an earthbender changes the landscape. Rockslide. "The Fire Lady is supposed to be a counterweight and just as powerful as the Fire Lord, at least traditionally," Toph informed her. "You're never going to manage to be a pacifist girly counterweight to Zuko's personality. You're going to be the ice to his fire. You need to kick butt and take names. I've seen you do it."
"But-"
Tired of her friend's attempts to interrupt, Toph slapped a gag of dirt onto her. "You've been all over the world. You've been to two different Earth Kingdom courts, the Northern Water Tribe court, you're the daughter of the guy in charge of the Southern Water tribe, you've seen people from the poor, to merchants, to rich people, to jerks like my parents, to regular farmers and you've seen them in all three nations. You know about people and how people take things and react to things and you'll know better than any stuffy noblewoman what a whole country needs, not just what the reports say."
"Thanks Toph," Katara said, when the earthbender paused to take a breath. She'd managed to bend water out of a fountain and turn the almost rock-hard dirt into mud, wiping the mess off her face. "I hadn't thought of it that way."
"No problem Sweetness," Toph said. She was going to ask about what other things had been bothering her friend, but thought better of it. Katara seemed to be feeling lighter already, and there was only so much tough-Toph-love anyone could take at a time.
After Katara had cleaned the last of the mud off her face, and finished muttering about guttersnipe earthbenders who didn't care about cleanliness, they sat in silence. Toph sat, admiring the complex layout of the stones in the garden, not to mention some of the interesting kinds of rocks and crystals that were there. Katara clearly thinking about whatever it was the waterbender thought about when she wasn't trying to mother everyone to death or angsting about being a bad person because she sometimes did less-than-nice things.
Finally, Katara broke the silence, asking, "How did you guys find Lady Ursa? Zuko tried to get something out of Ozai for the longest time, but he didn't have any success."
Toph would have answered, telling her friend all about their adventures, when they heard Aang's voice in a shout that had the teen's voice cracking sharply. "What do you mean Sokka wanted to marry his sister to Zuko!"
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