(no subject)

[beliefovermisery]

Eventually bullied into lying down and closing his eyes, Sokka has a hard time getting to sleep. But each time an idea forms, a new project, something he has to write down, there's someone there to push him down the second he pops up. After so many scoldings, so many hours of sleepless work, he does eventually conk out.

It's a deep sleep. Not a dreamless one.

Comments

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

"Mom. Mommy. Mommy, come back!"

Katara was dreaming of fire that she didn't remember seeing, tossing and turning in her bedroll next to Sokka almost feverishly.

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

He's a little boy again. He knows this in his mind, but that doesn't keep him from reliving this night, what had eventually become a distant memory.

Small hands wrapped with linen reach out to her. They're dark at the palms with dried blood - he'd only just started learning the boomerang then, but he doesn't hesitate to reach out and curl his fingers around his sister's shoulder to shake her.

"Katara, wake up. Stop it - wake up."

He knew their mother wasn't coming back and he didn't cry in the night, why did she get to, why was he woken up when his father wasn't, why...

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

It took quite a bit of shaking, and then her eyes flicked open, and she bolted upright in her brother's arms, and tried to push him away.

"The Firebenders are trying to get me, they're going to get me! Where's mom? I want mom!"

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

He jerks back, feeling his eyes widen, his breath taken. She thought he was a... a...

He shoves her down, hands on her shoulders, forced back to the ground. "Mom isn't here!" he yells at her, angry because anger is better than tears. "She's not coming back, not ever! It's just me and dad!"

But their father wasn't back from the mens' hut yet, so-- just him.

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

"I want mom!" she exclaimed in a whiny 'And I want her right now!' sort of voice, sounding like a little, spoiled child.

At least what she was asking for wasn't trivial. Not at all.

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

"MOM'S DEAD!" he screamed back, right in her face, and outside of his dream, the part of him that knew it for a dream, he winced and felt ashamed for the outburst. She was just a child, he shouoldn't have treated her like that.

He forgets he was a child as well.

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

Him screaming at her like that made her eyes go big and wide. Her face screwed up, and she started to cry big gulping sobs, the kind that make a child go blue in the face because they barely take enough time in between to breathe.

Her voice was almost a whisper as she drew up her legs to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

"I miss mooommy...I want mooooommy..." she gulped out to her knees, rocking slightly.

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

A child's hands loosen on her shoulders and he can feel his expression shift, pure rage to apology, shame.

Sorrow.

He swallows hard and hides his own sniffles behind the sound of her sobs, reaching up to touch her. He takes care not to use his palms, the dirty linen not good enough. But his fingertips start petting her hair as he slowly wriggles out of his sleeping bag to sit beside her.

"Mom isn't coming back," he whispers, feeling his eyes burn with held-back tears, "but... but I'm here, Katara. I won't go away." It's an offer and a plead - he made her cry this time, not the Firebenders. He's her big brother - he should be there for her.

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

Katara curled into him, still sobbing and sniffling.

"What--are we going to do--without mommy? Who's--going to tell me stories? Who's going to--fix our owies?"

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

He'd never held her like this before - he remembers that, remembers this being the first time he ever held and comforted her, the first time he actively wanted to. And he lets one hand find her back, the other petting her hair, mindful of the bandages.

He mimics the way their mother rocked them in her lap after a nightmare.

"Dad's still here," he said quietly, rocking her gently, his rhythm off without experience. "And when he's gone... when he's gone, I'll do it. I'll keep you safe."

Such a heavy promise for a little boy. If he'd known what work it would turn out to be...

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

The sobbing tapered off into sniffles.

"How can you do it? You're a big stupidhead."

But there was no malice in the insult, and it was more a challenge. Could he protect her and love her and be there for her when half the time she was going to be a brat and make him want to strangle her?

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

She gets her braid tugged for that, sharp and warning. A brother's tug, not a father's.

"Because I'm your big brother, dummy. That's what I'm here for."

It's what his mother always said. He just never wanted to agree with her.

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

Her bottom lip all pouty and wibbly, and she hugged him tight.

"You won't let firebenders get me, right?"

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

Surprised by it, his arms hesitantly wrapped around her, forgetting about the bandages. He remembers fire, he remembers smoke, he remembers brown skin burned black...

"Never," he whispers and his voice is hoarse, his eyes burning again. "No one's going to get you while I'm here, Katara, I promise."

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

"Sokka! Sokka, can I keep it? Pretty please? Gran-gran said to ask you because she said it would be your pet, too."

Near the opening of their hut, Katara stood holding a wriggling baby penguin in her arms, all bottom-heavy and adorable.

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

It's a blur - his arms go from full to empty, Katara just a bit older in front of him. He can feel the vibration in his throat when he groans aloud, the leather strap that falls from his fingers where he was learning to sharpen the boomerang.

"Katara, why are you bringing one of those in here? They have their own homes and you steal enough of theh jerky already!"

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

"But it's so cute!" Katara exclaimed, squeezing it gently. It wriggled out of her arms and made its way over to where the dried fish was stored and started digging in.

"And he doesn't have a home. His mother got eaten by an orca. Can't I keep him, pretty please?"

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

"Hey!" He barely notices what she's saying, too busy running over to pull the stupid thing from their food stores. It was slippery and wriggled out of his grasp more than once before he got his arms good and tight around it.

It's the mother thing that does it, he remembers. The stupid, wriggly penguin in his arms aside, it's that it doesn't have a mother and needs a home, it's that need to give everything motherless a home and he...

He sighs and looks at his sister. "...I gue-- OW!"

And then the penguin bit him and he struggled not to throw it across the tent.

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

"Don't hurt him! You're going to scare him!" she admonished, tugging the penguin off of Sokka, and cuddling it.

It didn't bite her.

Nothing she ever brought home did.

"Sokka says you can stay! So I'm going to be your mommy now," she told the penguin, cuddling it. "I'm going to call you Cupun."

She was always their mommy. Never just an owner, never a sister, or an aunt. She always said she was their mom, because it was always one that had lost one, always a little orphan. Or orphans, in the case of the gulls.

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

He hated the gulls. They made terrible messes and ate all their food and always bit him, always managed to hurt themselves. And whenever they got hurt too badly, broken wings and mangled legs, it was Sokka that was asked to set the splints, comfort Katara even while he broke their bones back in place.

He never said no. Not once.

Katara was their mommy, their protector. He was hers.

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

The world shifted again, and the two of them were trudging along the water line, checking to see if their nets had dredged any sea prunes off the ocean bottom.

Katara was yet older and had an extremely sour expression on her face.

"I don't see why I can't go. You know it would be a lot easier for you to go fishing if you had someone to help you."

Not that she could do much to help. She didn't know how to throw a spear. She couldn't magically make the fish float out of the water.

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

That expression was far more familiar than the tears and bright smiles of the last visions and Sokka is intensely familiar with the feel of his eyes as they roll, the sound of air pushed out of his throat when he sighs.

"It's not easier for me to fish when I have a girl in the back, whining about whether or not it's really right to be killing all the poor widdle fish. I catch less every time you go and you know it! Why don't you just stay here with GranGran and the other women?"

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

"You are such a sexist jerk," she exclaimed. "I'm not going to be whining--I know we need to eat, and I can do it just as well as you can."

Her face was full of defiance.

[notanoptimist.livejournal.com]

"I don't know where you learned to lie like that but it isn't working!" he'd snapped back, glaring at her over his shoulder as he started loading up the canoe. "Every time you go with me, the water's always bad and the I never catch any fish!"

That part was true.

Mostly because they hadn't yet discovered that an upset Katara created upset waters.

[flyingsister.livejournal.com]

"You act as if that's my fault!" she exclaimed. "That's nature. It's just coincidence."