A/N: Happy Tokka Week, my friends! This is a project I've been working on for... one week. I heard that Tokka Week was taking place August 1-7, and then I realized I was not going to be here for most of it, so I got down to business and am still in the process of writing my stories. In this collection, you'll probably recognize several themes, including shenanigans and Tokka lovins and what have you, and I took this week to be nostalgic and touch base with a bunch of old stories that I wrote. So if you happened to be an avid reader of my Tokka, you might see a few old things! If not, you can still enjoy this. Well, at least I certainly hope anybody can enjoy this, but I'm so self-critical that I just don't know! Wow, Debbie Downer here, sorry. Moving on!

One story per day, each day of Tokka Week. Sounds fun, right? Well I have 'till tomorrow to finish three stories (and I tell you, it is very difficult to write three stories at once), so the last three might be... a bit late. But until then, let's start with this story. It's the most... graphic... of the week's stories, but since the internet is for Tokka, that's okay. If you don't like this, give the others a chance. There are a lot of genres here. This story is only half-beta'd because metromax went to a party and got drunk and forgot to finish betaing (don't worry, I still heart you). I looked around on the internet after the finale, took pieces of dicsussion, and used them to fuel the fire that is my passion for this story. I hope you enjoy it, because it was a heck of a write-up!

Disclaimer: I don't even own Tokka Week.

Happy Reading, and Happy Tokka Week!

Influenced Epiphany

Three drinks in, and Sokka was thrilled to be able to say that he could say that he could speak more or less clearly. After years of practice, he'd found the happy medium between being completely ratmonkey-faced and being sober enough to remember what had happened the night before. He was on the verge of breaking this long-practiced medium, and Toph had developed a similar pattern as well (not that they were complaining).

They hadn't seen very much of one another in the last few months, since he more or less worked in Ba Sing Se and she took care of most of her business in her hometown, Gaoling. But tonight was a special get-together, which they had planned over several letters (all of which Toph had needed her parents to read to her, much to her chagrin) to meet once more and compensate for lost time as drinking buddies (much to her parent's chagrin, but since she didn't live with them there was nothing they could do).

He slid a drink across the table with a lazy wink at the frowning bartender. Toph caught the drink with one hand and grinned, lifting the overfilled mug in the air and spilling froth all down her arm and cut sleeve.

"To us!" she proclaimed.

Grinning, Sokka swung his half-empty drink against hers so loudly that the bartender winced from the other end of the long bar table.

"To us!" he agreed with a nod that she doesn't see. "Here's to the end of the war, and to the anniversary of the day we almost died but didn't—because we're just that good!"

They drank their toast and slammed their mugs down on the chiseled counter, and once he'd mopped up the resulting mess with his sleeve, Sokka took a good look around the little bar. It wasn't "little" per se, but compared to the grand bars of the Impenetrable City it was hardly more than a closet, tucked away in a little corner of Gaoling where he wouldn't be able to find it in time for the meet-up. He was willing to bet that she had picked this bar just so he'd get lost on his way—or, knowing Toph's reputation as a drinker, because it was one of the few she hadn't been permanently banned from. So he had limped into the bar late, half expecting her to be in a Katara pose—in other words, miffed—but she had been in good spirits from either the drink she'd already had or just from the fact that she was thrilled to "see" him leaning awkwardly against the doorway before her, and the rest of the night had gone flawlessly thus far.

"So," he began casually, pleased that he still wasn't slurring too much yet. "So. Toph. How's life been treating you?"

Toph nodded as she took another gulp, sending a small stream of amber down her front. "S'long as I don't have to see my parents more than once a week, life's pretty good, isn't it? They'll be at my place tomorrow for lunch, come t'think of it. What about you, Mr. Enforcer?"

She pushed back a strand of hair that had escaped from her bun, absently. Sokka didn't reply at first, but instead felt his glazed eyes follow the strand to the rest of its half-up tresses. They saw one another every few months, on all the special occasions—birthdays, holidays, near-death experience day, national drinking buddies day (the last one they had made up)—but every time they got together, she never failed to surprise him in some way, whether it was a story about almost getting an eye taken out or just the fact that her hair had gotten really, really long. And shiny. And wow, there went his hand without permission, reaching up to touch her hair until he realized what he was doing and forced it back down.

"Hey Sokka, you fall asleep?"

He snapped abruptly back to life at her retort, nearly dousing himself with rum at the sight of her furrowed eyebrows. "Huh? Oh, right. Yeah. Stamping papers and stuff." He made a vague stamping gesture with one hand, took another look at Toph as she busied herself by licking a eddy of rum from the side of her pint, took another long drink. He was slip-slip-slipping into drunkhood (which he didn't mind, since he was apt to feel less confused after anyway), slow and steady.

"How's Suki? You hear from her?"

He snorted into his pint at this and Toph began to giggle uncharacteristically despite the innocence of the question.

"Does that mean no?"

"No no no, I hear from her all right," he slurred, raising a finger at her face in mock seriousness. Toph sensed this gesture and stifled another giggle with her fist. "She's happier home than she was in Ba Sing Se, 'cos she missed her dad and family and life blah blah. B'sides, three years together and still no marriage stuff?" He waved a hand. "Puh-lease. It was sad to break up and stuff, but it's probably better this way."

Toph gave a sage nod and took a thoughtful swig. "Women, ya know?"

Sokka shook his head in agreement. "Crazy, all of 'em. If we didn't need them to make more of me, what the hell would we need 'em for?"

"You got that right."

That warm, complacent feeling he often only associated with drinking and Toph's companionship rendered him a smirking idiot. Then, when the pouty bartender passed by the counter, he grabbed her by the sleeve and asked for two more drinks, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively at her. She took the generous tip he handed to her before rolling her eyes and stalking off to the tap. Letting the pair of them into the bar together had been her first mistake, but letting them stay and drink was near suicide. It was only a matter of time until the pending explosion, and the young bartender had apparently not heard of Toph and Sokka's rowdy, unruly reputation in bars across the world.

She returned shortly thereafter with two more frothy pints, at which point Sokka had begun to recap the tale he liked to call "how we almost died but didn't because we're amazing."

Accepting the two drinks without so much as a glance at the bartender, Sokka passed one off to the Buzzed Bandit beside him and turned on his barstool to face her, his knees knocking almost violently against hers in his excitement.

"So there I was, surrounded by soldiers with you dangling from one hand and my sanity in the other. We were hangin' on to dear life, but we were stuck."

"An' your leg was broken!" added Toph. Her hands were wrapped around the pint as if she were drinking tea and listening to her favorite bedtime story instead of a war recollection, her blind eyes sparkling with intoxicated wonder.

"Oh yeah, I forgot about that!" Sokka snapped his fingers. "I got it cut open when I was fightin' those guards, right? An' there was blood friggin everywhere. An' then boom!"

Here he threw up his hands and showered Toph and the man seated behind him with droplets of booze. While the man merely shot Sokka a sour look and went back to his game, a look of stupefied wonder came over Toph's pale face and she threw her head back against the rain of liquor.

"Amazing!" she cried, though at what exactly he wasn't quite sure. "And then we stabbed all those guards and escaped on a war balloon before the other one kersploded into a ball of fiery death, hahaha!"

By now, a good number of people (the exasperated bartender included) had turned their heads towards the loud pair, whose story was both amusing and deafening at the same time. Unfortunately for the bartender, who could only fume as the situation dissolved at an exponential rate, the pair had done nothing to get themselves kicked out, not yet. Toph wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and belched loudly, which only earned more attention from the disturbed patrons nearby.

Sokka paused thoughtfully. When he finally did speak, his voice was more serious, more considering; the smile had dipped away from his face. "I thought we were gonna die, Toph," he muttered into the mug where he held it at the base of his bottom lip. His marine eyes darted towards her still frame and back again. "I was actually scared, which is sayin' something since I'm not 'fraid of anything."

He could almost feel her slick fingers slipping from his armored hand, the pain in his leg more excruciating than he could ever imagine—an old battle wound, properly taken care of but never healed perfectly for one reason or another. It was on nights like these, when the air pressure was just right, that the old throb plagued his steps, reminding him exactly just how much he had to drink in order to have an excuse for limping around like a fool. Sokka took another thoughtful sip, and then another, deeper one as Toph's stifled sob and "Aye aye, captain" echoed in the back of his mind.

"Yep, not the best way to go." What an understatement.

"You're telling me!" she countered grimly. "At least you can swim!"

"Not with a gushing broken leg."

"Ah, whatever. We din't die, did we? And here we are, drinkin' together and reminisca—remanes—remaniscis—oh, screw it—remembrin' the past. I couldn't die, anyway, not without ever telling…"

Sokka shot her a suspicious look, but she had already picked up another drink and was busy slurping the foam from the top.

"Good times, good times," she slurred.

"Those were the good times, huh?" Sokka sighed, eyelids dropping at the thought. "Back in th' day."

"Good enough," Toph agreed, shrugging. "We were famous and Aang and Katara weren't married or doing Avatarly stuff in the Fire Nation, but we had our issues: Katara and Aang couldn't find places to make out without you walking in—" Sokka gave a feeble hiccup and downed the rest of his drink before signaling for the bartender to bring him another, "—You and Suki were duking it out over where to live, Zuko was on a mommy hunt, and I…" she shrugged again.

Sokka leaned one elbow on the countertop and set the side of his face on it, his drink held fast on one knee. He grinned slyly at his friend and teased, "What about you, Toph? Busy makin' babies with The Duke and Mr. Moustache Man—haha, at the same time! S'not even possible—"

Toph shook her head solemnly, spilling more drink down her green and pale yellow-clad front. "Nope, never touched 'em. I was too crazy about you to flip around with 'ol Haru and his moustache—he tried, though, like two years ago. Lemme tell you: scariest moment of my life."

"Wait, what?"

In a moment of brilliant clarity, Sokka shook his head so hard that he almost fell off the barstool. For the most part Toph's explanation had been a jumble of sounds in his ears, but one thing had jumped out at him and smacked his brain around harder than any of Toph's punches.

Toph sighed, annoyed by his incompetence. "I said, I never did stuff with Haru; his hair was too tickly—"

"No, before that. You were crazy about me?"

Her face fell. Feigning a gulp from her pint, Toph almost effectively managed to hide the shade of scarlet that was blooming across her flushed cheeks. "Ah, that. Yeaaah…"

Sokka nearly slipped off the stool, but he managed to grab the edge of the counter in time. "Well, talk to me, woman!"

"Well, you were pretty hot stuff, right? Could you blame me for havin' a thing for you?"

She burst into laughter and he laughed too, for a good few moments, until he stopped as abruptly as he'd started.

Maybe it was the alcohol—yes, it had to be, because he'd never had a hard time suppressing this feeling before—but a strange sensation, the same sort of warmth that he felt every time they met after a long break, the most recent time he'd taken a good look at her, had crept up into his chest and throat. While he was being paralyzed by surprise (and, admittedly, a whole lot of other feelings too), Toph was experiencing a similar sensation as her laughter wore off.

"I was, like, twelve," she explained a little too quickly for him to catch properly. Her fingers ran along the rim of the mug, her delicate-looking mouth twitching into a frown. "An' you were the first person to ever—mmph!"

The fidgeting had been the last straw. Throwing aside his inhibitions to the fact that he had consumed not five but six drinks and had been deserving this moment for quite some time, he grabbed her knees to steady himself, leaned forward almost to toppling point and kissed her so hard that she had to grab the table in order to stay upright. And while in Sokka's mind it all made more sense than anything had in a long time, Toph had apparently missed the explanation memo because as soon as a split second later, she socked him in the arm. Hard.

"Ow! Hey, what're you doing?" he gasped, reaching one hand up to rub the bruising spot on his arm.

Her eyes flew wide in shock, eyebrows shooting up to her hairline. "What're you doing?" she countered breathlessly. She raised her pint and slammed it down on the bar table as if to prove a point and crossed her legs in a most feminine pose he wouldn't have thought she could accomplish. Probably Katara's doing; he was pretty sure he'd seen that exact pose somewhere.

He rolled his eyes and slurred, "Haven't you ever been kissed before, Toph? Duh!"

"Oh!" Her jaw dropped, and they stayed in a sort of surprised, drunken trance for a few seconds before she finally grinned mischievously at a spot somewhere near his left shoulder, already leaning in. "Awesome."

Somewhere—Sokka wasn't exactly sure, as he had been too busy watching her slightly parted lips inch closer to his own—between picking up her pint and sliding forward against his eager hands, Toph let the liquor catch up to her. One uncharacteristic yelp later and she was falling right past him towards the floor and tossing her drink into the air. Those at the neighboring tables stopped their miniature brawls and conversations to watch the Blind Bandit fall from her seat, watched the perfect curve of the half-full pint when it flew from her hand and doused both Toph and a very unprepared Sokka, who could only watch and try not to fall off, too. One of the people at a nearby table laughed, but was quickly silenced by his frowning wife. Sokka sat wide-eyed and staring. Toph spluttered and quickly heaved herself into a sitting position. The rum had spilled all over her tunic and made it cling to her delicately-curved frame at some places, while Sokka had merely received a shirt and lap-full of the drink. The bartender took one look at them and clapped her palm to her forehead.

"Whoa," she giggled, rubbing the side of her head in amazement. "I think I missed."

Sokka took one look at her—splotchy wet with her hair all undone and hanging in her face—and together they burst into laughter. He leapt to his feet, stumbled, then leaned and grabbed Toph's upper arm in one large hand. She came-to quite quickly for someone who could barely sit up, clambering to her feet and plunking down in her seat with another laugh. His eyes darted from her embarrassedly-amused face to the neighboring patrons, who had mostly gone back to their business. Under normal circumstances he probably wouldn't have made such bold moves, but he was a few too many drinks in and not thinking all too much about anything at all, never mind about something so trivial as his morals (whatever those even were).

He sat back down in his seat and grabbed his own drink, not bothered by the squishing noise his rum-soaked pants made when he plunked onto the barstool. There was a humming in his ears, a thudding in his chest that, by his experience, could be brought on only by very attractive women or a trip to the butcher's shop. And as far as he knew, there was no going back once it started up.

"Where were we, my dear Toph?" he asked in a voice he usually reserved for fancy parties—an exaggerated accent, made funnier by the underlying slur in his voice. Toph's smile widened at the sound. He took a drink from his pint and set it between them on the countertop.

Toph was already moving forward again, though this time she grabbed onto the counter with one hand to keep steady, the other reaching out and finding one of his blue-clad, broad shoulders. She sidled herself from her barstool and seated herself daintily on his knees, effectively closing the gap between the pair of them and making him flush at the same time. Her weight on his legs, while not altogether unpleasant—quite the contrary, even with the dull ache in the background of one irreparably damaged leg—brought what little focus he possessed sharply to the fact that this was Toph. Toph Bei Fong, whose parents gave him nightmares and whose faced plagued his war memories and daydreams alike, who fought hard and never ever had feelings for him, not ever (or so he had thought), who could drink more than most grown men and belch twice as loudly, was straddling his lap with one hand draped around his neck and was making him very, very vulnerable.

Desperate to stall at least a little, lest he lose the last fragments of his sobriety to his hormones, he asked, "Why din't you tell me, like, six years ago that you liked me?" His voice was oddly strangled, higher than usual.

Toph laughed yet again. He could smell the sweet drink on her breath, feel the hum of her laugh from deep within his chest, knew it was too late. "'Cos I couldn't compare with Suki's figure… back then!" she explained, reaching with her free hand to tug on the top of her tunic. He made a last-ditch effort to avert his eyes from this particular gesture.

Sokka, unaware that most of the people had not yet stopped staring at them, released the countertop so his hands could test out her waist. He patted the base of her hips once and nodded, businesslike: a perfect fit, if there ever was one. The only question was why he'd never tried before.

And then, so fluidly that he could never have believed that she was drunk beyond all means of the imagination if he hadn't just seen her fall sideways off her seat, her mouth was on his, kissing him both fervently and aggressively. Sokka wasn't sure which was the scarier thought: that he was kissing his best friend or that he knew he wasn't going to stop. His hands pulled tighter around her slim waist, her fingers danced up the back of his neck and pulled out his hair tie so she could better rake her hands through his hair. Maybe moments passed, maybe longer, but when Toph pulled back for breath he was only vaguely aware that half of the bar had stopped to watch the spectacle unfolding before them.

She pressed a hand against his chest, fumbled with the knot of his tunic. "Your shirt's wet," she observed matter-of-factly, so Toph-like that he could barely stand not kissing her now that he'd begun. "I don't like it."

"Me neither. Let's get rid of it."

"Good idea. Allow me, Cap'n Sokka."

He wondered if she could feel his hands and legs positively quivering with anticipation—he supposed, through the little bit of reason that was left, that she was too drunk to sense anything more specific than his warm breath on her face. But even if she could, he could just blame it on having too much to drink (which he had) and therefore save his manliness. She probably wasn't thinking about too much anyway, since she was still struggling to untie the knot in his tunic, swearing under her breath the whole way. Sokka knew he wasn't thinking anything at all, nothing besides the fuzzy train of thought running through his head: she's pulling off my tunic oh Spirits I can feel her hands on my chest (wow her hands are softer than they used to be) oh wait here we go kissing again (hey, where'd she drop my shirt?). This is totally awesome, best bar trip ever.

He reached around her waist and pulled at the knot on her tunic, loosening it and finally tearing it back so that the damp fabric fell open to reveal her pale yellow undershirt. Neither broke away this time, not for breath and not for the person a few tables away who yelled, "Get a room!" If he stopped to take a breath, something might happen to keep them from starting again, and he would have to walk away back to the city for another few months, and that just wasn't acceptable. So he and Toph carried on, so intensely occupied with one another that they couldn't see the frowning bargoers around them, his palms sliding up her back and forcing her closer to him still. She tasted like rum, smelled like some strange combination of dirt and perfume, kissed him as if she'd been waiting six years to do so.

Finally, when he could no longer manage to just sit there on that uncomfortable seat, he pulled back—which, incidentally, was somewhat difficult to do when she hand one hand entrapping the back of his neck and the other running along the side of his bare waist—and set eyes on the heavily-breathing Earthbender.

"Hey," he breathed, only because it was the only thing he could think to say with his brain half incapacitated and his body on the fritz. His eyes roamed curiously, hungrily across her pale face and almost-neat hair.

A small smile twitched in the corner of her mouth, she responding in the exact same way. "Hey."

"We need to get outta here. Prontoishly."

She didn't miss a beat. "Les' go."

Toph scooted backwards off his lap, and if he hadn't still had his hands around her waist she would have toppled to the ground again. But he did have a hold on her, and together they somehow managed to stand up start towards the long walk to the door—"Good riddance!" yelled one displeased woman—hand-in-hand. Sokka might have felt somewhat insecure walking down the long aisle, bare-chested and complete with "make-out hair," as he had once described it on Katara, but he was concentrating too hard on walking straight to do much else. Toph was in the lead, if only by a foot, tugging him along as if he were a lost child, both stumbling and walking into people and objects alike.

Unfortunately, they only made it halfway there. They had just sidestepped a very amused couple ("S'cuse us, war heroes comin' through!" Sokka called out) when the backs of Toph's legs knocked against one of the tables and sent her sprawling backwards across it with a yell of surprise. The table's occupants—a handful of men and women who had been watching as two middle-aged men played a game of portable Pai Sho—all gasped loudly at the sudden interruption, some saving their drinks at the last minute and others simply diving out of harm's way as Toph landed with a dull thud on the wooden surface. Sokka, whose hand had released hers as soon as she'd fallen, saved himself from a similar fate only by nearly knocking over several other people. Pai Sho tiles flew every where in a colorful explosion.

"What're you doing?" he gasped, steadying himself against the table's edge with one hand on the shoulder of the person next to him.

Toph groaned slightly and responded that she was falling and that he was basically an idiot for not being able to see her lying there. He countered this by putting one hand on his hip in a somewhat feminine matter, insisting that it was not he who had fallen onto a table (of all things) but she, and so she therefore must be the idiot here. It was at this point that the person Sokka had been using as an armrest shrugged out from beneath his hand, sending the intoxicated warrior almost face-first into the very table Toph was currently trying to sit upright on.

Sokka caught himself on the table, wincing as his bad leg twinged through his mental booze cloud. "You know you're ruinin' the romance here, Toph," he observed loudly.

"Ya think so?" She propped herself up into a sitting position before reaching blindly outwards, grabbing his arm, and yanking him off his feet. "I'll show you romance, you meathead."

In a flash, they were at it once more as if they'd never even stopped. One of the women who had been previously enjoying her night uttered a scream and fell backwards off the bench. Almost everyone gasped, a few laughed, some blushed at the overzealous couple that had knocked over most of the drinks on the table. Sokka swung one arm out sideways as he crawled up over her and reclined her backwards in their kiss, knocking aside several more drinks and sending the room into further disarray.

Everything was a blur of color and sound and light and feeling, nothing sharp in his mind but Toph in her aggressive nature. His knees ached and scraped against the scrubbed table, but for the most part there was nothing but this craziness that had overwhelmed him in a frenzy of emotion. It wasn't the sort of get-together he had planned, but Sokka had a feeling it was only getting better from here.

"Ya know," he began in low, pensive tones. His voice rasped slightly as she took this moment to begin a trail of kisses starting in the sensitive spot behind his ear—and how did she even know how sensitive that spot was?—and moving down his jaw, his neck. "Suki and me, we never made out on a table b'fore."

Toph broke off from her journey to deadpan, "Does that mean I win?"

"Not the point. What I'm tryin' t'say is… as great as this is… well, I can't kneel here forever, right? It's a little… uncomferble."

"You can say that again," muttered one man to another, both of whom had been watching Toph and Sokka with slightly disturbed looks on their faces.

"So what you're saying is we should—"

"Alright, that's ENOUGH!"

Sokka gave a yelp as a pair of strong hands grabbed him by his ears and jerked him backwards off of Toph and the table. He stumbled drunkenly sideways against the person, who he only realized was the bartender after she'd hurtled him into another table. Toph sat bolt upright, her hair now sticking up in every direction, her frown pointed in the general direction of the bartender.

"Hey, what gives?" she demanded.

The bartender's fists clenched. In one hand she held a broom, the other was pointed accusingly at Sokka, who slumped against the nearest table, rubbing his ears and wincing. "You two have been nothing but trouble since you came in here, and I won't have it. Get out now, before I beat you out myself!"

Toph was already climbing off the table and dusting herself off when she snapped, "Arite, we gotcha. Keep your pants on, lady." She turned on Sokka with an indignant look, and together they marched (stumbled) out of the bar, Sokka pausing only to upright one of the many cups (now empty) he had knocked over and shoot its owner an apologetic, lopsided grin.

"How rude!" he exclaimed to Toph, throwing his hands into the air and almost knocking over two more people in the process. "I didn't even get to finish my drink!"

Once they hit the warm summer air, Sokka—still naked from the waist up and completely ignorant of this fact—leaned in towards Toph's ear and whispered, "Anyone at your place?"

"Nope," she replied, grinning. "And I have rum."

Sokka clapped his hands together in excitement. "Race you there!"

xxx

His head hurt, but not as badly as he thought it would have—it was more of a dull ache than an actual throb, but either way it was not the first thing on his mind. With a small sigh, he picked up a steaming cup of tea in each hand and padded across the modest apartment kitchen. It was nearly midday, but he had awoken only fifteen minutes beforehand with a growling in his stomach and a need for something to drink. Leave it to his stomach to always be his alarm.

As he made his way down the narrow hallway separating the guest bedroom, bathroom, and master bedroom, Sokka caught his reflection in the hallway mirror—what does she have a mirror for, anyway? he wondered—and gave himself a quick once-over before nodding in satisfaction and moving on. If anything was for certain at the moment, it was that the blue and green shorts were definitely a good pick; if he could walk around in his underwear all day without getting arrested, he would do it just so everyone else could see them, too. A smirk flitting across his face, he continued on down the hallway until his bare feet stopped in the bedroom doorway, where the only light was from the sun spilling into the small window.

"G'morning," came the sleepy acknowledgement from across the room. Toph lay sprawled diagonally across the bed, tangled up in her rich silk sheets with a pillow clamped over her face.

"How's your head?"

Toph groaned. Sokka chuckled to himself and stepped over the green shirt and blue pants that lay carelessly strewn across the floor and made his way over to her. She tossed aside the pillow and sat up, tucking the sheet securely under her arms in a makeshift wrap so that she could use both hands to receive the cup he handed to her. Once he was sure she wasn't going to drop the tea, he set his own cup down on the bedside table and eased himself beside her, stomach-side down. Grabbing the nearest pillow, he propped it beneath his chin so he could get a better look at the green-eyed, bare-shouldered Blind Bandit.

"I've gotta say, this was the best reunion ever," he said, "But I think we might have gotten a little carried away back there."

She grinned, sipping her drink. A lock of hair fell in her face and she brushed it away with two fingers. "You can say that again. I'm guessing that we're probably banned from going there ever again."

"I wonder if they'll let me back in to get my tunic—it was my favorite one. Meaning that it didn't have any holes in it."

"I wouldn't count on it. You can just borrow one of mine."

"Ooh, nice." He rolled his eyes at her, though the smile on his face betrayed his true feelings and she couldn't see the gesture anyway. "Maybe I should just borrow your clothes all the time."

"Maybe you should."

Another thoughtful pause. As much as he wanted to linger on the subject, he wasn't quite sure of what he'd say, or maybe he knew exactly what to say and was just afraid of saying it. Either way, for now he was just happy to be here, drinking tea (no more alcohol for a little while, maybe a day or a few hours) with Toph and hanging around on her bed in his underwear. What was not to love?

"So Toph," he began casually. "Now that we've been kicked out of the last decent bar—although I wasn't too thrilled with the service, to tell you the truth—"

One of her eyebrows arched. "Excuse me?"

"No, I mean the bartender."

"Oh. Carry on, then."

"Well, what do we do now?"

At this she shrugged, set her tea down next to his, and turned sideways towards him. Her leg, not wholly covered by the sheet, brushed against his as she moved closer and sighed into his shoulder. Sokka felt a small shiver run down his spine. When she tucked her head under his chin, edging her supple, sheet-covered body down next to his, he caught the scent of her hair—flowery, but not too delicate, and tinged with booze. Like her. He heaved a sigh and rested his chin on the top of her head, ran a hand along the curve of her shoulder.

She whispered, insinuating, "We could do… nothing. All day."

"I like the way you think, Toph," was his amused reply.

"Or," she continued, smirking against his chest, "We could always—"

Knock-knock.

She stiffened in his arms, eyes growing wide with realization and quite a bit of horror. Pulling away from him, she sat up and turned an ear towards the doorway with the air of one recognizing an attack. Sokka, too, raised himself into a sitting position and turned his eyes to the door.

"What the—?" he began, but she cut him off with the most terrifying three syllables he'd ever heard:

"My parents."

Sokka felt every bone in his body freeze.

"Oh sh—"

"Sokka, move!" she hissed, turning and giving him a very Toph-like shove. He only barely managed to stifle a surprised shout as he tumbled very nearly off the edge of the bed, catching himself on the nearby table. His vision spun; he had to grab his head to keep it from spinning off of his shoulders. When he finally regained sight, he saw that Toph had already flounced from the bed, the sheet held fast against her chest with one hand, and yanked open her closet with the other.

A male voice called from outside, "Toph dear, are you home—? Don't tell me you're still sleeping—"

Toph reached into the closet and pulled out the first thing her hand closed on, throwing it backwards at Sokka. A moment later it landed on his head and doused him in darkness, and it took him several more seconds to wrestle it away from his face.

"Put that on," she demanded, already scurrying across the floor in search of her own unceremoniously-tossed clothing. "You need a shirt so I can tell them you came over for breakfast."

"Well I did," defended Sokka in amused tones even though his heart had begun to race with anxiety. If there was one thing he feared, it was being killed at the hands of a very unhappy, very rich Lao Bei Fong. "Only I stayed for dinner and dessert, too—"

"Just shut up and put it on!" She had found her undershirt and was trying to force her head through the sleeve, her voice muffled by the fabric.

At this, Sokka tore his eyes from the amusing scene and looked down at the article she'd thrown at him. His eyebrows rose. "Would your parents like me better if I was a crossdresser?"

Toph resurfaced from the depths of her shirt, frowning in bemusement. "No, I'm pretty sure they'll hate you no matter what you wear. Why?"

"Because." He held the cloth up to his eyelevel and grinned at her over the top of it. "As much as I like this, I don't think they'd much approve if they walked in and saw me wearing one of your dresses."

The knock on the door was louder this time. Toph cocked her head in the direction of the sound before striding across the bedroom to where he sat. She yanked the dress from his hands and leaned in, despite her urgency, for a quick kiss. Sokka returned it wholeheartedly, and when she broke away there was a grin on both of their faces.

"Get out of my bed, Sokka."

"Aw, that's cold."

xxx

Fin.

A/n: I know, I'm a sap and I don't write makeouts very often; sue me, why doncha? (Actually, please don't. I'm poor as dirt).

On another note, I'll be away from the 3rd to the 9th, so I gave my password the the amazing Izzy, who will be posting my chapters in my place. I'll be more than thrilled to respond to any and all reviews/questions when I return from my vacation thing. Also, before I forget to mention: THIS STORY IS A COLLAB! In other words, I paired up with the amazing and wonderfully evil Zeitgheist on CAPSLOCKTOKKA for this story, and she is in the process of illustrating this oneshot! So if you liked this, you'll love the fantastic art that goes with it. It'll be posted on the aforementioned livejournal community by tomorrow night.

So I hope you enjoyed this, and I look forward to spending Tokka Week with you!