The Girl With the Bread

The Air Temples

Sokka spews the berries from his mouth, wiping his tongue with the end of his shirt to make sure no juice remains. Toph pulls him to the lake where they both flush their mouths with water and then collapse in each other's arms.

"You didn't swallow any?" he asks her.

She shakes her head. "You?"

"Guess I'd be dead by now if I did." He can see her lips moving in reply, but he can't hear her over the roar of the crowd in the Air Temples that they're playing live over the speakers.

The hovercraft materializes overhead and two ladders drop, only there's no way he's letting go of Toph. He keeps one arm around her as he helps her up, and they each place a foot on the first rung of the ladder. The electric current freezes them in place, and this time he's glad because he's not really sure Toph can hang on for the whole ride. And since his eyes are looking down, he can see that while their muscles are immobile, there is nothing preventing the blood from draining out of Toph's leg. Sure enough, the minute the door closes behind them and the current stops, she slumps down to the floor in a faint.

His fingers are still gripping the back of her jacket so tightly that when they take her away it tears, leaving him with a fistful of black fabric. Doctors in sterile white, masked and gloved, already prepped to operate, go into action. Toph is so pale and still on a silver table, tubes and wires springing out of her every which way, and for a moment he forgets they're out of the Games and he sees the doctors as just one more threat, one more pack of mutts designed to kill her.

Petrified, he lunges for her, but he's caught and thrust back into another room, and a glass door seals between them. He pounds on the glass, screaming his head off. Everyone ignores him except some Air Temple attendant who appears behind him and offers him a beverage.

He slides down on the floor, his face against the door, staring uncomprehendingly at the crystal glass in his hand. Icy cold, filled with orange juice, a straw with a frilly white collar. How wrong it looks in his bloody, filthy hand with its dirt-caked nails and scars. his mouth waters at the smell, but he places it carefully on the floor, not trusting anything so clean and pretty.

Through the glass, he sees the doctors working feverishly on Toph, their brows creased in concentration. He sees the flow of liquids, pumping through tubes, watches a wall full of dials and lights that mean nothing to him. He's not sure, but he thinks her heart stops twice.

It's like being home again, when they bring in the hopelessly mangled person from the mine explosion, of the woman on her third day of labor, or the famished child struggling against pneumonia, and his father and Katara, they wear that same look on their faces. Now is the time to run away to the woods, to hide in the trees until the patient is long gone and in another part of the Seam where they make coffins. But he's held here both by the hovercraft walls and the same force that holds the loved ones of the dying. How often he's seen them, ringed around their kitchen table and he's thought, Why don't you leave? Why do you stay and watch?

Now he knows why. It's because you have no choice.

He startles when he catches someone staring at him from only a few inches away and then realizes it's his own face reflecting back in the glass. Wild eyes, hollow cheeks, his hair a rat's nest. Rabid. Feral. Mad. No wonder everyone is keeping a safe distance from him.

The next thing he knows they've landed back on the roof of the Training Center and they're taking Toph but leaving him behind the door. He starts hurling himself against the glass, shrieking, and he thinks he just catches a glimpse of a long braid - it must be Ty Lee, it has to be Ty Lee coming to his rescue - when the needle jabs him from behind.