Frozen Heart, Melted Ice

Chpt 14 - The Desert

"How could you let them take Appa?!" Aang shouted, turning away from the open desert to look back at Toph, "Why didn't you stop them?!"

"I couldn't!" Toph called, not bothering to turn towards Aang, "The library was sinking and you guys were still inside and-"

"You could've come to get us! I could have saved him!" Aang yelled, stepping close to the girl.

"I can hardly feel any vibrations out here. The sandbenders snuck up on me and there wasn't time for-"

"You just didn't care!" Aang shouted, cutting Toph off, "You never liked Appa! You wanted him gone!"

Katara stepped forward to intervene, "Aang stop it. You know Toph did all she could. She saved out lives."

"Who's gonna save our lives now?" Sokka asked, looking into the vast, endless desert, "We'll never make it out of here."

"That's all any of you guys care about, yourselves. You don't care wether Appa is ok or not." Aang stomped towards the edge of the dune they stood on and sat down with a puff.

"Aang, we need to care about ourselves right now. It won't matter if we care about Appa or not if we don't make it out of the desert alive." Y/n said deciding it was time for her to step in.

"Y/n's right." Katara agreed to Y/n's relief, "We're all concerned but we can't afford to be fighting now."

"I'm going after Appa." Aang announced, opening his glider and soaring into the distance before anyone could stop him.

"We'd better start walking." Katara muttered as she stared at Aang flying away in the distance, "We're the only people who know about the solar eclipse. We have to get that information to Ba Sing Se."

"You think if we dig out the giant owl he'll give us a ride?" Sokka asked as they began to walk in the same direction Aang flew in.

^ ^ ^

They had been walking for who knows how long at this point, and Y/n felt like her whole body was melting. The hot afternoon sun beat down on them, burning the back of their their necks. The backpack Y/n wore didn't help to cool her down, she could feel the sweat accumulating on her back from the warmth of the bag. Her whole body felt sticky, wet, and exhausted. The shoemaker back home was right, in comparison to the rest of her body, Y/n's feet weren't too hot, but they did feel slippery and sticky from the pools of sweat building up on the sole of her shoes. Periodically the group would stop to drink some of their bending water, usually Y/n's since she had just cleaned and refilled her flask.

Y/n was much luckier than Katara, whose clothes were long, thick and heavy, while Y/n's were thin and relatively breezy. She had untied her waistband long ago to allow her shirt to loosely hang and flow in the wind. The tightness of the thick band had just made her hotter, so it was much more comfortable this way.

"Can you watch where you're-" Sokka yelled after Toph bumped into him.

"No." She replied flatly.

"Come on guys, if we want to get through this we've gotta stick together." Katara muttered tiredly from the front of the pack.

"If I swear anymore I don't think sticking together will be a problem." Sokka said, attempting to wrench himself from Toph.

"Can I have some more water?" Toph asked while pushing Sokka away.

Y/n nodded and went to open her flask. Empty. "I'm all out." She mumbled, clipping it shut.

"I guess we can use mine." Katara said, bending 5 small bubbles of water out of her flask, one for each of the kids, plus Momo, "We've gotta try to conserve it."