Title: A Vengeful Proposal

Author: SCWLC

Disclaimer: Still don't own anything.

Summary: Aang and Sokka. Blame, vengeance and the avatar state. Ninth in the Proposal series.

Author's Notes: It's a little short, true. But this is what I've got.

It was the day before the wedding of the century, and Sokka was feeling more hopeful than he had in a long time. Katara was, if not back to normal, then getting close to being considered normal. Earlier that day, when he'd been harassing Zuko about letting his swordfighting technique go, she'd doused him with half the fish pond. She'd been too scared to do things like that to him, or anyone else, for so long that Sokka almost didn't react with the indignation that deserved.

Almost.

She was back to making nasty comments about his socks, and she and Suki were being absolute terrors about the wedding, which was normal, if really scary. Not to mention, she was in a frenzy of organising and paperwork and a whole bunch of things. Zuko had basically marched up to her one day with the portfolios of all the ministries in his government, and told her, "Traditionally, as Fire Lady, you're to handle the administration and budgets of the hospitals, orphanages, schools, and artistic institutions of the Fire Nation, so I need you to familiarise yourself with these." He dropped a box of scrolls in front of her. "When you're done, I want to talk to you about whether you think you want or could take on any other administration. I was hoping to divide things equally between us, but since I don't know which things you know enough about to pick up quickly, I want to go over it all with you."

To Sokka's discomfort and delight (which was a very annoying set of feelings to have at the same time, thank-you-very-much), she'd smiled flirtatiously and said, "Is this just because you want to free up more of your time for . . . bending practice?"

The smile on Zuko's face had been much skeezier, in Sokka's opinion, and he'd later told Zuko, "I just want you to know that all I ever want to be able to imagine going on between you and my sister at night is a long game of pai sho. Got it? That's all I should ever be able to imagine."

"What?" the other man had said.

Suki rolled her eyes. "Sokka just wants you to treat Katara like a nun whenever he's around so he can pretend that she's still six."

"Oh."

So, since things had been going great, in spite of the fact that Zuko was taking malicious joy in holding Katara's hand right in front of her brother and other skeevy things (he and Suki were totally different – he was two years older than his sister and way more mature) naturally, things had to fall apart. Distantly, Sokka heard Suki shout, "Aang! Wait! Let me explain!" Then he was being dragged along by a tattooed whirlwind, out the hall, down the corridor, outside, up onto the bison and in the air before he'd quite registered that he'd missed Aang's arrival by sleeping in.

"Wha-?"

"How could you do that to her? What did you do to her? How in nine hells did you convince Katara that she should just marry someone because you say so?" Aang demanded.

The sheer unmitigated gall of him demanding things when he hadn't been there, sent Sokka into a sudden fury. "What did I do? I did what I had to! Where the hell were you! They were tearing her apart out there and you were off skipping around the Earth Kingdom with Toph. She was there for you whenever you needed her for a year straight, no matter what crappy thing happened on the way! We needed you, Katara needed you! If tricking Dad into marrying her off to Zuko was the only way to get her safe I'd do it a hundred times over!"

Aang went quite pale and said, "What? What happened?" He leaned in closer to Sokka demanding, "Who was tearing her apart?"

Sokka glared. "I just want you to know that we tried to get in contact with you. I don't think so little of you that I think you and Toph would have ignored us, but we tried."

"What happened!"

So Sokka told him. About everything he'd told Zuko and about how they'd set the marriage up as a desperate final gamble to save Katara's sanity. When he'd finished, there was a pause, and then Sokka looked at Aang's blank face. "Aang? It's not your fault. It's just been a really stressful couple of years. I didn't mean it when I said it-"

A blueish-white glow erupted from Aang's eyes and tattoos and Sokka cursed, diving for the reins, yelling at Appa to get to the ground because he didn't want to try flying with an angry Avatar in the air with him. Appa obliged, diving hard and fast. They came up just short of crash landing in a palace courtyard. Which was good, because the air spinning around Aang was getting wildly out of control.

People were screaming and running, which was the sensible reaction to an Avatar that had gone glowy, Sokka thought wryly as he tried desperately to get close enough to Aang to talk his friend down. Suddenly, Katara was there, kneeling beside him, "What happened?" she shouted over the wind.

"I told him about Ujarak!" he shouted back.

"Sokka!" she looked indignant. If things hadn't been so serious, he would have hugged her. He couldn't recall the last time she'd felt confident enough in herself to feel indignant.

"Who's Ujarak!" Toph shouted. Sokka hadn't even seen her come up, and he wondered briefly why she wasn't clinging to anything, when he noticed she'd encased her feet in bent earth. Lucky earthbender. "What's got Twinkletoes so upset?"

Aang seemed to have heard. "He raped Katara. That son of a hog monkey raped her!" The wind redoubled, and Aang appeared about ready to fly unassisted out to the South Pole to commit murder.

"We have to calm him down!" Katara shouted.

Toph stared at her. "No we don't! We need to go and smash that guy's head in several times. Then you need to heal him so we can do it again."

"Not helping Toph!" Sokka shouted.

Katara, as she'd always done, braved the wind. She pushed her way through the maelstrom, while Sokka quietly moaned about her doing it again, and the rest of the courtyard of people watched in awe. "Aang! Don't! Don't lower yourself. You're the Avatar! If you do this, the peace you tried to create might fall apart! You're better than this Aang!"

His glowing eyes turned to her, and the sound of a thousand voices overlaid his own as he said, "No, I'm not. He hurt you. He deserves to be punished."

"Yes you are. You didn't kill Ozai, who was a thousand times worse than Ujarak could ever be!" Katara shouted, getting her hands on Aang and pulling him into a hug.

"Is she crazy?" Toph demanded of Sokka.

Sokka shrugged. "He gets like this, then she gets like that," he told her. "It's a thing they do."

"And Sokka already provoked a wooly walrus into attacking him and paralysing him permanently." The wind was dying down. "So Sokka already took revenge."

"Nice one, Snoozles," Toph told him. "Not enough, but . . ."

"I was working with what I could do at the time," Sokka told her. "Besides, the best part was that I'd soaked his clothes in female walrus musk before we left. The male was all over him. It seemed Ujarak made a pretty girl walrus."

Toph's smile was nasty. "Ooo. I like the way you think Boomerang Boy."

Aang finally settled down and stopped glowing. "I should have been there. You were hurt and I should have been there."

"It's okay."

"How do you do it?" Aang asked her. "You were so hurt and you're here comforting me."

"Practice, I guess."

With Aang now calm, people started to emerge and some of the servants started edging around the courtyard, picking up fallen ornaments and trying to clear up the mess. Appa started eating some of the decorative ivy off the walls.

That was when Zuko finally showed up, his mother and sister in tow. "What happened out here?" the Fire Lord demanded.

Silence met his statement. Then . . .

"Appa! Don't eat that!"