Title: Knight in Lack-Luster Armor

Author: Ultra-Geek
Rating: T
Summery: /Post Earth King/ Toph had given up hope that they'd come for her. But a part of her, deep down, never let go…
Disclaimer: I don't own anything
AN: Written on a whim. Can be friendship or romance, whatever floats your boat!

It had been four months since she had been confined to her parents' house. Four months of hoping, praying, and attempted bargains with the spirits that her friends would come for her.

It had been four months spent in vain.

Her parents had put metal onto all of the floors of their home. There was no chance that she could see. They'd decided that she knew enough earthbending, and the four months had been spent inside, her only way of fresh air through an open window. She had imagined every possible way that they would come for her.

Appa would come to the window, and they'd all fly off as her parents threw a tantrum in the gardens below. Aang would randomly come on his glider, and help her off the windowsill. Katara would manage to sweet-talk her parents into letting her go, and if that didn't work, would simply freeze them to the wall before briskly walking out the gate with Toph in tow. Sokka would climb up the terrace, and they'd ride off into the sunset. But they never came.

She thought of how she had drawn those escape plans from her childhood fantasies of grandeur. Of how a knight in shining armor would scale the wall and ride up on a noble steed, and carry her away from her hell-hole of a life. But he never came either.

Then, one day, not so different from any other, as Toph gazed out the window, something changed. Something inside of her broke, and with it, her last remnants of hope shattered. That day, something inexplicitly terrible happened.

She stopped hoping, praying, and attempting bargains with the spirits. She stopped imagining that they'd come for her. She convinced herself that she was alone, and that was all there was too it.

But there was a part of her, shaped like a bald boy, a waterbender, and a warrior that never really let go.

She lost her grasp on that unique head-strongness that made her her. Toph simply didn't care anymore. She was stuck in a hopeless whirlwind, and she did not care. Her so called 'family' had deserted her, had left her alone. The part that held on to the hope whispered that they didn't know where she was. Toph ignored it.

Another part of her was wasting slowly away. Every now and again, on the rare moment that an attendant left her by herself, she'd bend a few small stones off of the wall. But it never lasted. The attendant would slap the stones from the air, and pulling the blind girl by the hand, they'd clatter to the metal floor.

Toph stopped getting up one morning.

She didn't see the point in it anymore. Her parents begged with her, pleaded with her to get out of bed. She refused them the dignity of a response. Sometimes she'd walk over to sit in the chair on the far side of the room. But, otherwise, she remained stationary.

Nearly five months after she'd been captured in Ba Sing Se, two men came to the Bei Fong household. She heard one of their many butlers announce them to her parents. "My Lord and Lady, introducing Hakoda and Batu of the Southern Water Tribe…"

Something in the back of her mind told her that this was important, that she'd heard those names before. But she ignored it. Toph heard the door slowly crack open from the chair in which she sat. It couldn't be her parents, they were downstairs. And the footsteps were to light, to carefully quiet.

"Whoever you are," Toph said quietly. "Leave me alone."

"Now, Toph," She shot straight up in the chair. It couldn't be. "Is that any way to greet your rescuer?"

"Sokka?" She stood and walked over, deciding that if this was a hallucination, she wanted it to last as long as possible. She put her hands up to his face, tracing his nose, forehead, and chin. "Sokka!" She wrapped her arms around him, and he hugged her back. She paused, hearing someone coming down the hall. "You need to hide!"

"Relax, that's just Scarface,"

"Peasant, will you hurry up?" A some-what familiar voice came from the hall.

So maybe she wasn't riding away into the sunset. Maybe it was ok she was being smuggled out in the back of a wagon. And it didn't really matter that her knight's armor was rather lack-luster and in desperate need of a polishing. Because, in the end, all that mattered is that they had come for her, and that she was free.