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“Shit,” Toph grunts, and promptly drops them all into a pit, shutting the ceiling and encasing them in total darkness. The raiders they’re fighting are good, fast and clearly experienced, and Toph is starting to get irritated and just a little hungry.
Katara and Sokka freeze instantly. The raiders do too, albeit with a bit more cussing. Aang switches from airbending to earthbending so that he can see and Zuko… keeps fighting?
Honestly, Toph had been ready to knock him down to stop him from lighting a fire and giving the raiders vision, too. She realizes now that she probably should have warned him about this particular tactic, but he seems perfectly content in the pitch dark, disarming the non-bending members of the raiders with his dual dao with ease. It’s short work for Aang and Toph to take care of the earthbending ones, knocking them out with a few good-sized rocks.
The raiders are dropped off at the town they’ve been terrorizing to much applause and fanfare. Aang and Zuko are, predictably, embarrassed. Aang gets swarmed instantly, and Zuko tugs his hood down to hide his face.
Oh, right. The scar probably makes him pretty recognizable even when he’s in casual wear, and the Fire Lord’s not supposed to be in a tiny town ten miles away from the Caldera, dealing with a tiny band of raiders that haven’t quite accepted that the war is over yet.
Toph and Sokka take over, all gleaming smiles and fake bravado while Katara ushers Aang and Zuko back to Appa, shooing off the remaining few curious stragglers that Aang and Zuko don’t have to heart to ignore.
Toph waits until the three of them are disappear onto Appa before yawning theatrically and saying, a bit too loudly, “Well, I think it’s time for me to get back to that nap these hooligans woke me up from.”
Sokka, in the middle of gesturing wildly with his club, turns, heart speeding up in confusion.
Toph jabs him in the foot with a sharp jut of rock before he can open his stupid mouth. Clarity dawns on him suddenly, heart rate returning to baseline, breath huffing out in a laugh. “Alright folks, you heard her. Show’s over.”
There’s a fair bit of grumbling, but the mayor helps shoo the townspeople back to their original business. He stays behind to offer a pouch of gold, the reward posted for bringing the raiders to justice, but is turned down by Sokka with a quick grin.
The flight back to the Palace is filled by Sokka, who clearly wasn’t finished with the storytelling when Toph had interrupted him. It’s relaxing, in an annoying kind of way. They’re big damn heroes now, vanquishers of the Fire Lord (Phoenix King?) and restorers of Justice and Peace, but Sokka still talks with flailing arms, the metal cuff he wears on his wrist swinging in wild circles, boomerang on his back twisting in a way the human spine probably shouldn’t allow.
It’s not until they’ve settled down for a quiet dinner in Zuko’s room that Toph get the chance to interrupt.
“Hey, Sparky,” she calls, shoveling a heaping mound of rice into her mouth and swallowing with a dramatic sigh. “You secretly an earthbender or something?”
It’s a sign of how much things have changed that Zuko’s heart doesn’t speed up wildly at the accusation, the way it did in the early days when he had even the slightest idea that he’d done something wrong. Instead, his hand stops on its way to his mouth. “What?”
“Gained some kind of seismic sense or something? Come on, man, spill. You were fighting in that cave no problem, and I know for a fact that you haven’t pulled that particular stunt with us before, because I’m the only one that pulls it.” With that, she reaches over and fumbles at Sokka’s plate. He grumbles, but good-naturedly holds it still until her questing fingers reach the dumpling that he always saves for her to steal.
“Oh.” Zuko’s hands are not trembling, but he sets his plate down just a little bit too carefully. “I learned after, y’know. This.” He gestures with a limp hand at the side of his face.
Katara and Sokka wince in unison. It’s a well-known story by now, carefully spread to the right people by Suki and the rest of the Kyoshi warriors. It had been an (extremely effective) tactic to quell Ozai sympathizers – after all, in a nation of honor, a man who would mutilate his thirteen year old son for protecting his people doesn’t really get respect.
It had also kept Zuko up for weeks, terrified that his friends and nation would lose all respect for him and abandon him, or exile him again or something.
Before Toph can stop him, Sokka opens his mouth and blurts out, “Wait, what?” He then winces again, mostly because Katara smacks him on the arm, but also a little bit because he clearly didn’t mean to let it out. Zuko’s as tense as anything, vibrating so hard that Toph’s surprised the plates on the floor aren’t rattling.
Toph reaches for a joke, or witty comment, or something, but she can’t find anything that toes the right line between parents, eh? and dry heaving at the idea of Zuko’s dad burning the flesh off of his face for speaking out of turn.
“It’s like when I burned Katara,” Aang says. He’d been so quiet that Toph had almost forgotten that he was there. “I couldn’t firebend for months.”
The tension ekes out of Zuko slowly, and his shoulders droop, relieved. “Yeah. Something like that.”
Toph has a million more questions, but she also has the tact to keep her mouth shut when it’s clearly a sensitive subject. She shovels another dumpling in her mouth.
“Any time anything got too close to my face I would just- freeze,” Zuko starts again. It’s significantly less cheerful in the room than it was five minutes ago, but Sudden Group Therapy Time is something of a well-loved tradition between them now. It’s hard to confide in anyone else when you’re sixteen, or fourteen, or twelve, and your invincible façade is the only thing that keeps the world moving, some days.
“Uncle would have to take me back to my room and make me breathe. The first time, it took a whole hour before I could move again, and Uncle stopped letting me train with the crew. On bad days, even lighting the candles for meditation would-” Zuko cuts himself off there, throat working helplessly.
“But I still had to keep in fighting form, because, y’know, the Avatar.” Zuko sends an apologetic half-smile at Aang, who shrugs with a cheerful grin. “So Uncle had the idea for me to learn to fight blindfolded. Just hand-to-hand, at first, then with the dao. It was- it was a while until I worked myself up to firebending.”
“Wait,” Toph can’t stop herself from interrupting. “It’s not some new firebending thing?”
Zuko chuckles for real. “No. Sorry to disappoint, but I’m still the only one of the Avatar’s teachers that doesn’t have an obscure, ridiculously powerful bending technique up my sleeve.”
“So you just,” and this time it’s Sokka interrupting, watching Zuko with rapt attention. “What, learned to fight blind? Just like that?”
Zuko shifts, uncomfortable with even the beginnings of praise. “Well, I adapted it from an exercise Piandao used to do with me. He and Fat would start in a certain position, and then I’d blindfold myself, and then they’d spar. I’d have to try to keep up a play-by-play based on sound.” He snorts, a wry smile on his face. “We didn’t do that exercise too many times, because I was shit at it. I don’t think he really expected me to be good, because it’s a Master-level thing, but it gave me a really good foundation.”
Sokka squints at him, then whips his cloth belt off and ties it onto Zuko’s eyes in one smooth motion. Zuko lets him, leaning back on his hands.
Sokka takes a step back, “A step backwards,” and draws his boomerang, “drawing a weapon, probably the boomerang,” and whips it into the corner of the room, where it hits and drops with a noisy clang. “Corner behind me, to my left. Hit the drawer on the way down. You better not have chipped the wood – that was a gift.”
Sokka’s eyes narrow, and he grabs Zuko’s dao, placing the hilt on the back of Zuko’s hand. “En garde,” he says, then draws his sword and brings it towards Zuko’s head in a slow, graceful arc. Zuko stops it with the sheath, blades still pressed tightly together inside. The flat of Sokka’s blade taps almost inaudibly on the soft leather. “Okay, so how’d you know where I was gonna hit you?”
“A whole sword moving through the air’s not exactly quiet, Sokka,” Zuko grumbles, shoving the sword to the side with his own.
Sokka sheathes his sword and whips the blindfold off. “You’re so teaching me this, dude.”
Zuko places his own swords back on the floor and shrugs. “I can’t deny that it’s turned out to be a pretty useful skill. The vision on this side is- not awesome. I kind of like fighting blind better, because compensating for the depth perception sucks.”
A grin starts spreading on Toph’s face. Zuko notices, and tips his head back to stare at the ceiling. “What have I done.”
Toph rockets to her feet, punching the air. “Blind Rumble, baby! Blind Bandit versus the Blind Blue Spirit, coming to you live from the Fire Nation Palace!”
Zuko flops onto the floor, burying his head in his hands. Just like that, the tension in the room is gone, and Sokka’s back to ribbing Zuko, prodding him on the side while Aang and Katara laugh.
Toph sits back, propping her feet up onto a cushion and wiggling her toes. The sounds of her friends roughhousing washes over her – that is, until Sokka dives at her to tickle her feet. Then it’s game on.
She hopes Zuko’s saving some energy as he helps her manhandle Sokka into a headlock-noogie. Tomorrow’s match is going to be fun.