(no subject)

[beliefovermisery]

"Go back to sleep, nukka. I'll still be here."

"You better be."

"I'm not going anywhere."

Out the window of the Aerie, the world is a mix of white and blue. Solid land breaking up into ice floes, icebergs bobbing here and there, everything covered in a thick layer of snow, making the breaks in the land where the ocean is darkest all the more obvious. Clear blue sky is incredibly pale for how cold it is and the clouds are in whisps, building up in the distance like there may be another fall of snow soon.

Sokka is staring out the window while Zinda flies, not talking. There's too much to think about.

Idly, he fingers a bracelet on his left wrist, made before he left. The thick leather cord wraps four times around his wrist, on the outside of his wraps, and is threaded through the holes carved in a small disc of blue stone with very careful carvings put in.

It's his now.



Ice, snow, wind, ocean, stone. As soon as the plane's gone, it should start feeling like the tribe again. He hasn't seen it in almost four years, three years since he saw the Northern Tribe. If nothing else, he shouldn't be able to tell the difference just from living so differently for so long.

But it's all wrong. Everything is wrong.

The placement of the hills. The color of the water. How the clouds move, the consistency of the snow. The first time he sees an animal and it's a rabbit - not a rabbitseal, not a rabbitfox, not a rabbibear. It's just a rabbit.

It's as wrong as everything else has always been, since he stumbled over that root.

And that feeling of being alone and alien is getting to be eerily comfortable.



The sporting goods store he raided in Metropolis before coming here labeled the coat he's wearing as a "parka," but Sokka found that more insulting than anything. Synthetic fabric filled with goose down, slick and shiny and brightly colored. No fur, no leather, the designs are meaningless, made to look "cool."

But it's warm. Like the sleeping bag, the mittens and pants and boots, the tent. He has a backpack with flint and his knife, a small portable lamp, some jerky to start him off.

When he was a boy, he lived in a small village. They were protected from the elements by a wall of snow and ice around them to block the wind, small igloos to keep huddled families warm at night, the communal hut made of leather to shield them from the worst storms. They hunted with clubs and spears in groups of ten and twenty, their clothes were made from the flesh of their kills, constructed skillfully with bone needles and stitched with twine, attached with bone buttons. They cooked with pots and pans carved from the blue stone of the earth. There was a system and community and skills that were shared throughout the tribe.

He has none of that now.

He'll have to make do.




It is fucking hard to make do.

The tent is set up easily enough and he even manages to find a spot that's cut off enough from the wind that a fire is possible. Hunting takes some work but he remembers the basics of tracking and has had more experience with his weapons in the last five years than he'd like to admit. That's not so hard.

The difficult part comes when he's killed the beast, an enormous polarbearfox with a blunt snout and stubby tail, skinned and separated the meat, and has to do something with the skin. He's never been good at sewing, though he technically knows how to do it. The skinning is messy but he gets out the knife anyway, hoping to salvage it into a blanket, to start with.

And realizes he has no needle.

Or thread.

How the hell did they do this in the village?




A bone needle. Thread made of sinews.

Bloody fucking fingertips from making the needle and sharp, angry cursing as the fur skin gets more and more ragged the more he works with it.

If he ever sees his grandmother again, Sokka is going to worship her at her feet.

And then ask her to sew for him.



Cooking is easier. The first day he arrived, Sokka filled a bucket with icy water on the coast, then brought it back to his camp, hanging it up high on a post just outside of his tent. Over the next few days, the water evaporated and left salt behind. And salting meat, drying it out into jerky... that is one lesson he will never forget.

And while it might not be seal, the warped polarbearfox meat is still delicious. He eats more than he needs to, then crawls inside his synthetic tent to sleep in his growing collection of furs.