markofthewise | Sokka the 81st

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Sokka the 81st

Sokka woke up in the tunnels with a sudden jolt. He was cold, extremely cold, and no matter how much he pulled on his arms, he couldn't seem to get warm. His memory was a blur, but it slowly began to occur to him how he'd just returned from a mission. Then there was the droids... He shuddered as he thought about that. Had he been kidnapped? Maybe it was why he was so cold.

He pulled himself to his feet and instantly regretted it. At first he stumbled into the wall and scraped his elbow along the side. It bled, but he paid no mind to how it hurt. At least until he realized he needed the wall to steady himself, at which point he turned along side his back and waited. When he went to cover the cut with his hand, he decided that made it altogether worse. So he continued to ignore it. Instead he strained his ears for the sound of anything. The tunnels had their usual hollow echo, though it was more thunderous and he realized that meant there was rain falling in from the entrance. Upon finding his strength, Sokka made his way towards the entrance of the tunnel, using his hand to trace the edges of the wall in case he slipped and needed to brace himself. When he reached the entrance, his guess proved to be right. There was a torrent of rain coming through the entrance of the tunnel and much more rain cascading along the edges.

If he'd had any sense, he would have waited in the tunnels. But he made his way up the ladder, keeping his grip tighter than normal due to the slick conditions. It proved to be a wise decision when his foot slipped at one point and he was left dangling by his hands. By the time he made it to the top, he felt more like himself than normal, but he was drenched to the bone and feeling miserable for it. He felt very sorry for himself and realized he was bound to get himself sick like this. He found himself worried about what Katara would think. The last thing he wanted was to see her upset. But even as he plodded on home in the rain, he found himself stuck on that line of thought. It was a bewildering realization that he was more concerned about how his troubles would impact his sister than it would him. The line of thought seemed almost foreign to him. As he stood outside the house, staring at a stony slab with his own face imprinted in it, he began to understand he was worse off than he thought. More than that, he was hesitant to face anyone.

He delayed his trip by taking the long way home, making his way behind the barracks and into a secret entrance to the house. The tunnel leading to the basement was wet and ankle deep as he trekked his way home. Earthbenders may make great tunnels, but Toph hadn't put much thought into water run off when she carved it out of the ground. By the time he made it to the basement, he was back to shivering again. While a warm July rain may not freeze a man, a cold basement did little good for a man in soggy clothes. He took the opportunity to change into some spare clothes, all the while waiting for sounds of activity upstairs. He wasn't alone, so he waited in the basement as he tried to sort out his thoughts. He nearly went to go wait on the spare bed, but found he could not even do that. He remembered the last time he had been in that bed.

Asami. His stomach lurched as he realized the seriousness of what he had done. But that was nothing compared to what had gone on with Katniss. It had been over three months since he and Katniss had begun their relationship. Of course, with a newer clarity, Sokka couldn't quite describe it as that. His memories with her felt hollow and visceral. They lacked meaning or any sense of fondness. He was able to look back at them with the same sort of distance he did with the false memories he had gained from experiments. But he knew these weren't false memories. They weren't echoes of another life. It was all things he did. Things he said. Lies that he told for his own benefit. His fists tightened as he realized the seriousness of what he had done. They were so tight that his fingernails, only slightly overgrown, pierced his palm and made him bleed. He hissed at the pain and used a roll of paper towels to clean them.

But the blood served to be reminders of things far more awful. He remembered the draft. The stinking, burnt bodies of the cultists. The carelessness as his sword split flesh and bone. The utter lack of empathy he felt for any of them. Worse yet, he recalled a great-winged man pleading for mercy. A man who claimed he was no cultist. Sokka had killed him anyway. It was with a great heaviness that Sokka understood so well why he so adamantly told Katara and Aang why he wouldn't want his heart back. It may have been broken before, but now it was so much worse. It ached with shame and guilt. It gnawed at him so hard that his thoughts turned dark and tempted him with the idea of how easy it would be to go back to not feeling again. But he only thought of his death. The horror and cold of being in space. It had only been a moment, but in his memory it felt like an eternity. As his thoughts tempted him further, he lost his temper and threw aside one of the shelves. He snatched a coat and marched back into the tunnel to lose himself in the woods. The loudness of his fit would probably attract his housemates just above him. He wasn't ready to face them.

He couldn't hide forever and he didn't want to. But the thought of apologizing to each and every person he had wronged was a weight on him. Some deserved it more than others. In his mind it was obvious the two he had hurt the most. Suki and Katniss. He had broken Suki's heart and said unbearably cruel things to her. He could never take back those words and he doubted he could ever have her back at all. But he had to try. And to do that, he would have to break Katniss's heart first. They had entered their relationship on a pretense of not feeling anything for one another. But Sokka was no fool. After the three months they had been together, he knew this was going to hurt her. Much as he wanted to spare her, he couldn't simply continue where they had left off like it was fine. She was a friend, but he didn't love her. He couldn't be with someone he didn't love.

There would be others to apologize to as well. He had wronged Edward Elric by turning his teachings to horrors. He'd said cruel things to Winry, Sheena, Korra, and plenty of others. Richard Sharpe deserved a chance to deliver a blow to Sokka's face for the humiliation he'd given him at the birthday party. He mulled it all over, thinking of each encounter he had. At one point, he stopped at a tree in the woods where he emptied the contents of his stomach along its trunk. He felt weaker for it, but he was far from hungry. He wanted to settle one thing first before he found his sister.

---

His first stop was at Katniss's house, where the wet and bedraggled Sokka rapped his fists at the door and hoped she would be the one to answer. Before anything else, he had to resolve their relationship.

His second stop was looking for his sister, Katara. He searched for her at the clinic first, since it was about the time she ought to be working there. By the time he found her, he felt close to falling over. But he needed to be certain he talked to her, regardless of how he felt.

By the time he made his way back home, the rain had let up for a few hours. He didn't feel better, but he'd at least put some food in himself courtesy of the vending machines at the Battle Dome. The first person he went looking for was Asami. She deserved an apology in person.

He ended up staying in his room after that, even though it would have been better to look for the others. The journal would have to do instead.

---

[Voice]

I haven't been myself for awhile now. I really messed things up. I... [There's a long pause as he finds himself at a loss for words.] I should have done better. I will, from now on. I owe apologies to a lot of you. If you'll let me, then tomorrow I'll come find you in person.

[There should be more. But he doesn't know what else to say. It's enough that his voice is weak and miserable without saying much more than that. So he leans back against the wall and keeps his journal open in front of him. Waiting for whatever they have to say in turn.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Back in Sunnydale -- or even in Scotland -- if Buffy had ever been told she would one day quite willingly embrace a life of denim shorts and sail-mending...? Why, she would have laughed the teller out of the room. For one thing, Daisy Dukes were always tacky. And for another, the task of tending and mending sailcloth was hardly a glamourous one. Then again, neither was battling the undead and she'd long ago taken to that habit.

But here Buffy sat bent over a corner of cloth. Her legs -- tanning nicely beyond a dark denim hem -- were crossed. She occupied a portion of Luceti's dock next to small two-person sailboat: the Sineya. It was her practice boat, built over a year by a pirate who had been eager to see the Slayer learn the trade. And she was out this afternoon giving her some love and care.

She left Sokka to his own devices for an hour or so -- allowing them both to seep in the solitude and the sun. But eventually she pushed to her feet, stuck her marlinspike into the bun of blonde hair at the back of her head, and meandered over to the Ocean Spirit.

"If you ever need extra hands to scrape her bottom...?" Buffy trailed off. "Wow, there's nothing about that that doesn't sound dirty. Sailors -- pigs, all of them."

He became aware she was doing her own thing for awhile, but just as she let him be, he did the same for her. His own ship benefited from the attention as he ended up scrubbing the deck of the accumulated grime it had received from days of rain and no sail. It made him only more aware that he needed to take it out again before the summer was gone.

"The bottom is fine, really. I cheated a kid into doing that in exchange for a bow."

"...Which kid?"

She dropped down to a seat on the dock's edge -- feet dangling.

"Loki. Uh. Not the creepy one."

He didn't much like the creepy one. Except when he was soulless. He though Loki was just fine then.

"...Huh." She hadn't met the non-creepy one. "How'd it go down?"

"He wanted a weapon and didn't want to pay for it. He did a very impressive job trying to weasel his way out of it. But now I owe him a boat ride."

"Sounds like he got the better end of the deal, if you ask me. Maybe you're the one who was cheated."

"Probably. If I did, I had it coming. I cheated plenty of others."

She crushed a splinter of wood between her fingers -- not ever quite tearing her eyes off him.

"Why?"

A simple question. Bold and brash and touched with just enough sympathy to show she cared, but not so much as to imply easy forgiveness. Why did you cheat plenty of others?

He looked over at her, lips pursed. He'd had this conversation with her once, but it had been with different outcomes. Even now, he hesitated to say it, though he'd already confessed it to more than a few by now. But when he founds his voice, he kept it simple.

"I died." He remembered he told her about his first time, so he added: "Again."

Her lips pursed. It was true, then. Emotion crept over her face: delayed grief; bittersweet relief; gnawing concern. Mourning a death in Luceti was so strange when you only learned about it after the fact. It introduce so much directionless sorrow. Pain with nowhere to go because the subject was already returned. Already here, close enough to reach. Touch. Hold, if necessary.

But Buffy barely moved. "What happened?"

Sokka gripped the side of the ship as he stared into the water below. His eyes tried to focus, but it was difficult. His voice wavered and he did his absolute best to keep hies eyes dry. He didn't succeed.

"I was on a ship, like the one that took us to the Moon. There was no battle, it was just maintenance. There's a lot to do, since they sometimes have to deal with cultist attacks. I was in a hangar, with other workers and volunteers. We were just working on the Tyr Fighters. But then there was an alarm. We found out that there was a problem with the hangar doors. So we were ordered to evacuate.

But the hangar doors weren't the only things that weren't working right. The airlock into the hallway wouldn't lock. We closed the door, but it wouldn't stay shut. It wouldn't click. I wasted so much time trying to make it click. So, I realized there was only one thing to do. Close it from the other side and lock it manually. So I did. But I didn't think I'd die. I ran to the nearest Tyr Fighter. I was going to climb inside, then just wait to be picked up. I would've had enough oxygen to last a few hours inside on them, even if it didn't run.

I was on top of it when the hangar door finally opened. It whipped me into the air and I tried to grab onto anything, but I couldn't. I was just... in the air, being pulled into cold, black nothing. I don't know how to describe what happened after that. I've accidentally breathed in water before and choked it out. I've breathed in smoke before. But this... there was nothing to breathe. I couldn't even make myself try. Any air I had in my throat was just sucked out. Before long.... it all just went dark."

Buffy listened. In a very few instances, she was good at it: letting facts and feelings wash over her phrase by phrase and twist by turn. Towards the end, she tried not to admit to herself that Sokka's description held something of a siren's call. And that five or six years ago she would have welcomed such nothingness. Such a bloodless slip into death. But here she was -- grown up and renewed and she felt proud of the horror brewing in her belly. It was good to be horrified by death; there was little else that made her feel more alive.

"And I guess it stuck a little more readily than last time, huh?" Full, complete death. "You came back a week later. I never even realized." She thought about Archie, his subterfuge, and the lengths to which he'd went to keep his death a secret. "You probably planned it that way. Funny how much death a person can hide in this place."

"When I came back, it didn't bother me. I knew it should, but it didn't. But I knew it would bother everyone else, so I decided not to talk about it. Once I figured out what my death penalty was... I didn't want people to find out, because I didn't want to be fixed."

Of course, Shikamaru found out. Aang and Katara found out. They fixed him without his consent, even though he had been adamantly against it.

"...What did it take from you?"

Despite the overflow of feeling and concern for Sokka, Buffy allowed no room for it in her voice. Sentimentality was never her strongest suit -- not when creeping around the corner of death and revivification.

"My heart." It was the only way he knew to describe it. Soul would perhaps be more accurate, but it had never occurred to him to think of it that way. "I didn't love or hate. I didn't get sad and I didn't feel guilt. I was just... alive. And that was it. I could do whatever I wanted, so long as I thought I benefited from it."

But it was a way of thinking that occurred to her -- quick and sharp in her gut. As a woman who'd entangled herself with two men known for their intermittent soullessness, she knew the signs all too well: "You soul. Your heart was still there, right? Beating. Fulfilling its heartly duties. It sounds like what they took was your soul."

A quip occurred in his head. My shoes were fine. It died in his thoughts before it even reached his tongue. So he shrugged. "Maybe? I don't know. It could have been a part of the brain that is responsible for empathy and other social behaviors. It was a death penalty, either way. How it worked doesn't matter."

"I suppose it really doesn't."

Loss was loss, no matter how it was sliced and labelled. A soul, or neurons, or some abstract designation of conscience. Hell, even the absence of happiness could make a person behave erratically.

"I'm sorry; I should have realized..." She felt -- not responsible, no, but somehow a failure. There she'd been, spinning grand cautionary tales for Suki about the ways in which men changed. She should have seen the signs. She should have been less wrapped up in her own troubles.

He shook his head. "I was pretending to be normal. And it's not like I did anything around you that was any weirder than normal."

"...How many of us did you fool?"

"Lots, at first. Some people had clues, I guess. Ed saw how I acted in the draft. Winry found out from him. Raven and Hiccup knew something was up with how I ran the shop. I managed to make Suki flat out hate me. I don't think Aang and Katara would have figured it out if they hadn't heard from others first."

"Funny, isn't it? How the people best placed to notice are usually among the last. Or maybe they just don't wanna believe it." A beat. "Not that it's ha-ha funny, of course. Just...funny."

Her heel slapped against the dock. Thunk, thunk, thunk. "Have you spoken to her since...?"

Suki.

He shook his head. "She's not in Luceti. Apparently the droids got her while I was away."

Worry crept into his voice. Three years in and kidnappings were as worrisome as ever. He'd learned not to dwell on them, but it was always unsettling to think about what a loved one might be going through at that very moment.

"An unhappy coincidence. Do you know what you're gonna tell her when she's back? I mean -- I assume you are gonna talk to her."

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