Do you believe in life after death?

It was hard not to, Toph found nowadays. After all—with the Avatar being one of her best friends… And Aang had technically had more then a hundred past lives.

Time had flown by. It seemed that at one moment, Toph had been in a gilded cage. The next she was standing along side strangers, ready to fight a war. Those strangers had quickly become her best friends, the first ones that she'd truly had. Unlike the play dates her parents used to set her up on, those children had been bred to be their parent's lap dogs. And in an odd way, she felt sorry for them.

They'd won the war, lost a few friends along the way, made enemies. Looking back on it, Toph wouldn't have changed anything. They were older now.

Aang and Katara were engaged —Sokka and Suki had certainly been "busy", Suki had birthed a healthy baby girl only three months ago, and Suki was already expecting again.

They kept growing older, and that's what scared Toph.

Her eyes were useless in a sense. Katara had once described them as pale blue with some kind of filmy appearance. This meant nothing to her in reality; she could care less about what she looked like. But there was one thing in her mind. Her mother had often dyed her hair when Toph was younger. She could still remember the odd scent of the dye, and she'd been sitting on her mother's bed as her mother had done her hair.

When Toph had asked why she dyed her hair so often, her mother had calmly replied that her hair was graying, because she was getting older. It had hung in her mind like a dark cloud.

Toph couldn't see whatever this getting old was. And that's what scared her. Uncle Iroh was old, although he never acted like it. Sometimes he'd have the odd complaint about how his back was bothering him. And as Iroh had gotten older—she could feel how frail he'd become. As she and Zuko had kneeled by his bed, she could feel his life slip away slowly. That had scared her too. She couldn't see death.

Every moment that they lived—it moved towards death. She could feel herself growing older, as well as her friends. When Sokka had complained one day about seeing his first gray hair—it had left a sense of dread that filled her chest. She knew that she couldn't stop it, no one could stop time. Not even the world's greatest earth bender.

As the years passed, she could feel time wearing away at her own body, as well as her older friends. The day Suki died was a horrible one—Sokka was never the same after that. Even as he developed early stages of Alzheimer's, and Katara could do nothing about it, he always at least remembered to have his stupid cheesy jokes.

Aang had once said that a friendship could last forever, and somehow Toph didn't feel so scared anymore. If their friendships had lasted a lifetime—somehow she knew that it could last this long—it could last forever.

Heh, don't know why I felt like writing this… I really do think that friendships can last forever, as cheesy as it may sound. Anyways, just a short friendship one shot.