Chapter Text
The first time Sokka ever feels his soulmate, they’re burning.
He’s just turned eleven, and only just received his soulmark that morning.
The spirit-chosen have never been common among his people, even less so after one hundred years of war and ruin. Katara was the only child amongst their village to be blessed with a soulmark— a pale golden pair of wings, almost indecipherable from her bronze skin. Sokka was a little jealous of it, or at least he had been, until his own mark appeared.
That was even rarer, Gran Gran told him. Almost all of the spirit-chosen are born with their marks, but on rare occasions when they deem it necessary, the spirits themselves must reach down to the earth and bless someone that’s already there.
That’s what’s happened to Sokka.
One day there’s nothing, and the next, there’s a dragon. It takes up his entire arm, scales etched in elegant red coils. It’s a rare color— one that Sokka doesn’t see often. Proud and bold and he likes it immediately, even if it does remind him a little of the uniforms of the men that took his mother away.
Gran Gran runs one gnarled finger down his arm and tells him not to worry. The misconception that a color or a symbol in a soul mark represents the nation from which its source hails has long been disproven. Sokka’s crimson dragon could just as easily belong to an Earth Kingdom warrior or a child of the Northern Water Tribe than to someone from the Fire Nation.
The marks are manifestations of another’s soul, and no matter how desperately the Fire Nation tries, souls cannot be molded by the land upon which they are born.
Sokka stares down at his own arm in reverence and wonders.
The burning comes later.
He jerks awake in the middle of the night, because there’s something wrapped around his wrist, and it hurts. He opens his mouth to say something, to wake Katara who sleeps peacefully beside him, but then the burning shifts— grows— eating away at his entire forearm and a hoarse shout of pain rips it’s way out of Sokka’s throat.
Katara jerks awake next to him, but he’s already rolled over onto his side curled around his arm like he can somehow protect it from pain that isn’t even his.
The next thing he knows his father is there. Hakoda pries his fingers away from the clenching grasp they have on his forearm and he’s saying something but Sokka can’t focus enough to make it out when he feels like his skin is being melted off.
It takes almost an hour for the pain to reside enough for Sokka’s ragged gasps to even out. When they do, he finds his father watching him with concerned eyes.
“What—“ Sokka rasps, throat sore— “what was that?”
“Half pain,” Hakoda tells him, eyes distant and hazed with terrible recollection.
Sokka knows what he’s remembering. The day that mom was taken from them.
He remembers it too.
He remembers being hidden behind a wall of ice, peering over it into the mass of men as they fought. The singe of flesh and the copper stench of blood weighing down the arctic wind.
He’d seen his father wheel about, readying his machete for a blow, seen him hesitate, and wondered, with panic welling up his throat, why?
And then Hakoda had collapsed into the ice with an awful sound— like an animal being butchered— and even though Bato managed to drive his spear through the chest of the ashmaker that loomed over him before anything could happen, Sokka had known, deep inside, that he'd lost a parent that day. He’d known before he ever returned to the igloo, to Katara’s too large eyes and pale, strained face, that his mother was gone.
He wonders if being spirit-chosen is more of a curse than a blessing. Forced to live half of your soulmates experiences, forced to know that every hurt is twice as bad for them, that, somewhere far away beyond your reach, they’re suffering.
Sokka knows that the half lives— the half pains and half joys— are supposed to be a tool. They’re supposed to connect a pair, to forge their bond, to help them find each other and then to help them understand, once they have.
He’s heard the tales, the songs and poems— but laying in his bedroll, arm still aching, watching his fathers distant eyes shutter in memory, Sokka thinks that none of those poets or bards could have actually had a soulmate.
They wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew what it was like— what it was really like.
⟢
A fortnight after Sokka’s mark appears, a trading vessel brings the news.
Fire Lord Azulon his dead.
His first son, Iroh, Dragon of the West is carved from the line of succession and now the youngest son, Ozai, now sits upon the Dragon Throne. With his ascension, a new flood of troops have pushed into the Earth Kingdom, scorching through farmland and villages alike.
Sokka eavesdrops on his father and Bato’s murmurs of war and ships and smoke on the horizon and secretly wonders how much this new upheaval in the outside world has to do with the new mark that twines its way up his left arm. He wants to believe that it doesn’t, but he knows there must be a reason for the spirits to have chosen him now.
Gran Gran had told him that his spirit touched could be an Earth Kingdom warrior, or even a child of the Northern Water tribe, but Sokka thinks that he already knows that they are.
They’re a prisoner.
He knows this because every hand that touches them stings, and bites and hurts. Every hand that touches them burns, and Sokka may be young, he may be foolish, but he’s not stupid.
He knows what red hot hands mean, just like he knows that soot black snowfall means death.
The Fire Nation has them. Whoever they are. Wherever they are. The Fire Nation has them, and the Fire Nation is hurting them. It shouldn’t come as such a shock. Afterall, the Fire Nation has the entire world under its boot. The Fire Nation is hurting everyone. But they’re his spirit-chosen, his half life, and it’s not right— it’s not fair that they have to suffer like this while Sokka can’t do anything to help them.
(To save them, he thinks sometimes, laying in his bedroll late at night with raw, invisible fingerprints stinging at his skin. Save them. That’s what he wants to do. It’s what he wishes he could do, even if he’s a boy and his father has just left him and he’s not even gotten the chance to learn how to make his own whale tooth scimitar yet.)
Sokka begins to feel guilty for every little mistake he makes. Every time he trips on the ice and bruises his knee, every time he stubs his toe on the canoe that’s been stored just a bit too close to the entryway of their igloo, every time his hands waver and he accidently makes a small cut over his palm with his jawbone knife, or gets a fish hook stuck in his thumb.
His spirit-chosen is already in so much pain, it’s the least he could do not to contribute to it.
It’s different for Katara than it is for him.
One day, he finds her sitting outside their igloo, fist bloody from having rammed it into the ice until her knuckles spit open. He doesn’t say anything, just takes her inside and helps her wrap it before Gran Gran can notice and scold her.
Still, he catches her watching him sometimes, an odd look in her eye when he winces at a phantom ache or pain.
Sokka knows that she’s not exactly jealous. Not how he used to be at least, before the dragon appeared on his arm. It’s just that he can feel his soulmate, and even if all he feels is pain, at least he knows they're out there.
Katara never feels anything except for the cold.
No pain, no rage, no fear, no joy.
Just nothing.
Just cold.
Sometimes it gets so bad that Sokka has to lay in her bedroll with her, wrap his arms around her shivering shoulders and will her to be warm. She feels frigid in his arms, like she’s been carved from ice, and he’s so, so scared that he will lose her. If the cold actually belonged to her, he knows that he already would have. Sokka is grateful that it doesn’t, even when the impossibility of it makes her sad and furious.
It changes when he is thirteen.
When Sokka is thirteen, his face is set ablaze.
He falls to the ice with a crunch, and distantly, beyond the choked whimper strangling its way out of his throat and the blinding white heat devouring his face, he can tell Katara is kneeling over him, reaching for him, her voice shrill with panic.
This is going to kill them, Sokka realizes.
Whoever they are, whoever it is that the spirits have chosen for him– this is going to kill them. They are going to die a brutal death at the hands of some faceless ashmaker and Sokka will never get the chance to meet them.
He’s only feeling half of it— half of the pain, half of the terror and the betrayal— but it’s enough. It’s more than enough. It’s unbearable. He writhes in the snow, choking on screams, and he waits for the pain to stop.
He waits for them to die.
But they don’t.
Sokka awakes the next morning, and they’re still there. A warm presence at the corner of his mind. They’re hurt and aching and scared and betrayed, and a whole other host of emotions that are too intense, too varied, too daunting for Sokka to pick apart, but they’re still there.
A warm tear tracks its way down his cheek.
He tries not to imagine what they look like now, what that flare of unimaginable heat has done to their face. It must be almost entirely gone, warped with scorched flesh.
He has nightmares after that, and in them everyone he knows looks at him with clouded eyes and burnt off faces— Katara, Bato, his father— all blind and melted and almost unrecognizable. His soulmate must look like that too, he thinks when he wakes up.
The thought doesn’t scare him as much as it probably should.
He already knows that he’ll love them no matter what.
At least, Sokka thinks— when the memories and the dreams and the stinging of raw flesh gets particularly bad— at least if they survived something like that, they won’t ever leave him.
His soulmate is strong. Strong enough to live through something so vicious, so excruciating. If they survived that, Sokka can’t imagine that there’s anything in the world that could make them leave.
And then, they do.
It happens at night, as these things most often do.
It’s only a month after the burning.
Sokka knows it's a month, because it’s the longest his soulmate has ever gone without being hurt, and he’s counted each day that passes without a new ache or pain. His face still hurts everyday– it stings and throbs and smarts as if he’d dipped a fresh wound into the cold salt sea, but nothing else– nothing new.
Sokka is relieved.
He wonders if that means that they’ve escaped.
He wonders if that means that they’re free, and then he wakes in the night and there’s burning again.
It’s around his wrists this time, and accompanied by a surge of panic and shame and visceral rage that scares Sokka because if it’s only half of what they’re feeling then what on earth are they feeling? His cheek throbs, but thankfully this feels more like a blow than a burn, his scalp stings as if someone has seized him by his wolf tail and dragged him across the room with it, and then something touches his hip and that’s definitely a burn and then—
Then there’s nothing.
Sokka gasps, flat on his back. He’s kicked his furs down until they’re tangled around his legs and his whole body is trembling, though he’s well versed enough at this by now to know that it’s not from the cold.
He stands on shaking legs and slips across the igloo to wake Gran Gran. She doesn’t rouse as quickly as she used to, but when her age hazed eyes blink open and begin to shift from confused to concerned, Sokka’s own eyes flood with tears.
“They’re gone,” he gasps, doing his best not to sob so loudly, because really Katara deserves to sleep after how many times he’s awakened her in the night with cries and groans. “Something– I– they’re gone .”
“Sokka, Sokka,” Gran Gran soothes, running her cold fingers across his cheeks to wipe away the tears. “It’s okay child, it’s okay, what’s happened?”
“I don’t know,” he hiccups, “I don’t know, someone hurt them and then they were just— they were gone— and—“
Gran Gran shushes him, tugging him gently into her bedroll like he’s a small child and Sokka goes easily, letting her pet at his hair and murmur quietly in his ear until he’s calmed enough to sense the faintest brushes of warmth at the corners of his mind.
They’re still there, even if they aren’t really there. Sokka can still feel their heat, even if the soreness and the aches and the occasional sting that still flares in his face, even months after they’re face was set alight, are noticeably absent.
It’s not possible to break a spirit bond, Gran Gran tells him, the next morning. That would mean that a mere human was somehow more powerful than Tui and La and Agni and all the other spirits combined. It’s not possible to break a spirit bond, but it is possible to block one if someone is given the proper motivation.
Sokka thinks about last night, about being restrained, about burning hands that were far more familiar than they ought to be, about shame and rage, and he tries not to imagine what that motivation might be.
(But he thinks he knows anyway. The Fire Nation are monsters. Nothing will change that and nothing proves it more than the children like little Amka with her amber eyes and too pale skin and mother that tries so hard not to resent her but only sometimes succeeds.)
Sokka thought that he knew hate. He’d seen it in the faces of the ashmakers that took his mother, felt it in his own heart when Katara would jerk awake beside him calling for her. He thought that he’d known hate, but he hadn’t known it at all.
That had been a slim approximation of the emotion, weak and watery, but he knows it now. He tries not to think of that night when he stopped feeling their pain and he learns to know hate like the back of his hand.
⟢
When the Airbender’s iceberg shatters into a blinding beam of light, Sokka feels an incomprehensible sense of hope. It doesn’t really feel like it’s his, but who else could it belong to?
Not them.
It’s been years since they left him. Years since they were anything more than a faint pulse of warmth skirting the corners of his conscience.
At least that’s enough for him to know that they’re alive. Sokka is grateful for that. Sometimes, he misses them so badly that his entire chest aches. He even misses the burning, the feeling of scorched skin and stinging hands, because at least that meant they were with him.
But they’re not with him anymore, so Sokka claims the hope as his own, even as he cranes his neck in awe and realizes that every Fire Nation ship within a hundred miles will have seen this.
⟢
The Fire Nation comes, and it’s like nothing Sokka ever could have prepared for.
The black snow arrives first, blotting into the tundra in little inkblots, painting the world soot grey. Sokka tilts his head back just long enough to glimpse it falling and it lands, sour and acrid, across the cold numbed skin of his cheeks.
For all of his rage–his hate– he’s scared too.
His fingers tremble as he paints his face, the familiar gestures doing little to soothe his heart’s wild race. He straps on his arm, buckling each strap and checking it with a tug, sheathes Boomerang across his back and then hefts his spear.
Outside the black snow has thickened, and each step he takes breaks through a crust of coal-hued ice and into the pure packed white beneath it. He scrambles to the top of his watchtower and waits.
It doesn’t take long for the looming outline of the ship to materialize in the distance.
It’s an iron goliath, emerging from the fog like some ancient beast and Sokka stands alone, knuckles whitening where his fingers wrap around his spear, as it slices through the ice sheet before the village like a hot knife through seal fat. For the first time in his life, Sokka fears that he might be the one that dies first– that he might be the one who leaves his soulmate behind and not the other way around.
The impact of the ship grinding to a halt in the ice sheet throws Sokka from his perch on the wall, and he lands hard in the snow breath ghosting from his lungs. For a moment he can pretend that everything is fine— normal— but the black snow is falling and he drags himself to his feet as the Fire Nation vessel gapes open, gangplank falling from a black maw.
Figures emerge from the shadows, looming, imposing in their barbed armor. Three of them step forward, beginning to descend the gangplank, and with each step the metal shudders and rattles and Sokka is the only thing standing between these men– monsters– and the village. He charges the leader and the next thing he knows he’s hitting the snow again, losing his breath again, Katara’s scared shout of his name working its way through the drumbeat of his pulse pounding in his ears.
The leader of the ashmakers is smaller than the soldiers flanking him, voice an angry rasp. It sounds like it hurts when he speaks, like he’s worn his throat raw from yelling, and he’s asking for something impossible.
He’s asking for the Avatar.
Sokka’s blood runs cold. It must be a ruse– an excuse. When they cannot procure a miracle, the Fire Nation will raise their village into the tundra and then claim that they were resisting.
He throws Boomerang and the leader of the ashmakers side steps it with such disdain that Sokka’s blood boils. He lunges forward and soon his spear is broken at his feet and then he’s on his knees in the black snow. Metal flashes in the distance and Sokka stares up into the ashmakers faceplate and grins.
Boomerang always comes back.
“Prince Zuko!” One of the guards shouts as the leader reels– and Sokka takes a brief moment to mark that name, to add it to his list, and to hate its owner– before the leader– the Prince – reaches up and tugs his dented helmet off of his head.
Sokka blinks in surprise.
He’d been expecting an adult— a man— but what he gets is glowing yellow eyes and a boy.
The Prince can’t be much older than Sokka is. He has black hair cropped close to his skull, bladed cheekbones and the same pale skin that most ashmakers have with one glaring exception— the red burn scar eating away at the left side of his face.
Sokka can’t help it– he stares.
He’s seen burn scars before. Of course he has— he’s Southern Water Tribe. There probably isn’t a single elder in his village without a flicker of reddened scar tissue somewhere across their arms or hands. This scar is different. It’s on a face– not a hand, a wrist, a shoulder. A face.
Sokka stares at it and thinks, so that’s how it will look.’
It isn’t long before the Fire Prince notices his stare and snarls a flurry of sparks from his mouth. His hands flare with a blaze of scorching red, the heat of it so intense that Sokka feels the fine hairs on his face wither and vaporize. It’s terrifying– and then Aang is there, so slight in his golden robes, as if the lightest gust of arctic wind could just blow him away.
He fights the Prince, and Sokka realizes that it probably could.
The wet of the snow seeps into his knees. His spear lies shattered in the snow before him and thick whips of searing flame keep creeping far too close to the villagers.
Sokka knows what those feel like. He doesn’t want them anywhere near his people.
But it doesn’t matter what he wants. He’s failed. He’s weaponless. Even when armed, the Fire Prince had swept him effortlessly aside. The hit with Boomerang had been simple luck, entirely dependent on the Prince’s lack of familiarity with the weapon.
His father had told him that this was where he was needed when he left with the fleet, but Sokka isn’t needed here at all. He’s been useless.
If he can’t protect his own village from a single Fire Nation ship, how is he going to find his soul touched in the middle of the Fire Nation? How is he going to free them from whatever prison they’ve been kept in? How is he going to stop the people whose hands are made of fire from reaching out and burning them, again and again?
The Fire Prince takes Aang and leaves the village. He doesn’t burn it, but Sokka wouldn’t have been able to stop him if he’d wanted to.
Katara stares after the receding shadow of the ship and Sokka already knows what she’s going to do. His fingers curl around Boomerang and he lifts it from the soot tinged snow.
He hates the Fire Nation more than ever before.
⟢
They get lucky on the Fire Prince’s ship.
Lucky that Aang was already halfway to escaping on his own. Lucky that the glacier above was weak enough to crumble and fall. Lucky that the Ashmaker Prince was too preoccupied with chasing Aang to turn back the way he came and destroy the village.
Katara’s eyes are fierce and glaring as she floods the deck with ice, and Sokka slips away from Appa’s side in search of Aang. When he appears— gliding down from the watch turret above— the last thing that Sokka expects is for the Fire Prince to leap after him.
Aang lands gently, folding his glider closed with a snap. A heartbeat later, the Fire Prince slams into the deck and rolls, springing easily back onto his feet.
Sokka winces a little. It might not show on his face, but there’s no way a fall like that didn’t hurt.
He’d felt one similar once, through his spirit bond. All the air had been punched out of his lungs and the bones of his wrist had felt as if they were shattered under the skin for weeks after. It was one of the few times that the half pain didn’t come from fire, and Sokka had felt so guilty for being grateful.
But he doesn’t have time to reminisce on that now. He’s face to face with the Fire Prince— once again— and he had no plans of letting this meeting end the way that the last had.
Burning yellow eyes meet his and go narrow. Somewhere behind him, Sokka hears Katara call Aang’s name, relief in her voice.
“Out of the way.”
The Fire Prince’s voice is seeped with command. He must be used to being obeyed.
Sokka grins.
“Nah.”
He barely ducks a whip of flame as it singes the air above him. When he straightens, the Fire Prince's fists are wreathed in flame.
“I wasn’t asking.”
Sokka’s fingers tighten around Boomerang and the Prince's eyes flick down. He’s standing close to the edge of the deck, having cornered himself while rolling to recover from his reckless leap after Aang.
Drawing his arm back, Sokka flings Boomerang as hard as he can, the Prince dodges left, another step closer to the water, and Sokka edges right, blocking the deck.
He sees the way the Fire Prince puts the pieces together, the minute widening of his eyes in realization, before Boomerang comes wheeling back and he’s forced to take another step left— and off the edge of the ship— to dodge it.
“Aang!” Sokka yells, praying to the spirits that the boy hadn’t been too preoccupied by seeing Katara again to pay attention to the murderous ashmaker that came chasing after him. “Now!”
A fierce gust of wind answers him, and the Fire Prince, already slightly unbalanced by his dodge, disappears over the side of the ship with a hoarse shout of rage.
Sokka catches Boomerang proudly, before leaning forward to take a peak over the edge. He’s expecting to see pointed armor sinking into the waves, steam melting out of the chunks of sea drift ice—
Sokka yelps.
Halfway down the flank of the vessel, the Fire Prince dangles by his fingertips, face twisted in concentration. The glare that appears when he sees Sokka peeking over the edge will emblazon itself across Sokka’s nightmares for months to come.
The Prince opens his mouth and Sokka thinks that he’ll yell. Maybe threaten Sokka, maybe insult him. Call him a peasant again or something— he seems to enjoy making that particular jab. Anyways, the point is that Sokka is ready for some verbal sparring.
In fact, he might even anticipate it.
Then a yellowy something flares behind the Prince’s teeth and he breathes fire.
Sokka throws himself backwards just in time, but the heat of the flame singes his eyelashes and for a brief, terrible instant, he remembers the day when his face was set ablaze. His hands tremble as he shoves himself up off of the deck and he’s still shaken when he makes it back to Appa.
As they lift off and Aang brings an avalanche down on the ashmakers ship, he peers over the side of the saddle and sees the Fire Prince— back on the deck already— staring after them with hateful yellow eyes.
The eyes of a monster.
Sokka shudders and looks away.
Even as the ship dwindles on the horizon, floundering and swamp in sheets of crushed ice, Sokka feels the burn of those ugly yellow eyes.
Later, as they approach the Air Temple, Katara raises the question that Sokka has been dreading ever since the Fire Prince’s face was revealed.
“Do you think—“ Katara starts, touching a hand to the left side of her face. Her voice is lowered so that Aang, steering from Appa’s head, can’t make out their conversation. “Do you think that he’s…“
She sounds almost sick at the possibility.
Sokka cuts her off.
“No.”
When she looks at him with a question in her eyes, he taps a finger at his left cheekbone.
“Too small,” he says. “It felt bigger than that.”
Katara’s face softens in relief.
⟢
But Sokka can’t stop thinking about the scar across the Fire Prince's face.
Red and rippling and eye-catching.
He asks Suki about it on Kyoshi, hoping that whatever answer she may have for him might break the link between a burn across the face of his enemy, and the one that he knows must stretch across the eyes of his spirit-chosen.
Sokka knows that theirs must be larger than the Fire Princes— he’d felt it happen after all, or half of it at least. He still can remember the press of heat against his skin, the sensation of skin sloughing off, the certainty that once it ended, they would be gone. He can still remember the way that his entire face throbbed for months after, so he knows that the mark across Zuko’s face can’t possibly hold a candle to the wound his soulmate bears but he asks anyway.
(He forgets that Agni’s children do not burn with the same ferocity that his people do.)
He’s sprawled out across the floor in the dojo, desperately seeking some semblance of a night breeze sweeping under the doors, while Suki sits in kekka-fuza , methodically polishing the razor edges of her fans. A wayward gust of that coveted night breeze lifts her hair up around her cheeks, and her pretty white painted face is intent on the blades in her hands.
For a brief traitorous moment, Sokka wishes that she was his spirit-chosen, but he quickly shakes the notion. It’s not fair to any of them. Not fair to Suki, to wish such suffering upon her. Not fair to his soulmate, to wish for someone else. Not fair to him, to reject that with which the spirits have blessed him.
“What do you know about the Fire Lord’s son?” Sokka asks and Suki’s hands still over her blades.
“The Fire Prince?” She says after a moment. “Besides the part where he’s after you and your friends?”
Sokka nods.
He figures she has to have more information than he does, especially as head of the Kyoshi Warriors. She hadn’t been as transparent about that aspect of their order as she had been about other parts, but Sokka’s almost certain that there’s at least a few spies amongst the girls.
“Do you know about how he got his—“ He flails a hand awkwardly in the general vicinity of his left eye, and Suki’s eyes sharpen in understanding. Candlelight catches on her fans oiled blades as she places them carefully on the tatami.
“No one really knows how he got it,” she tells him. “The most common story is a training accident. It’s the most likely too, especially from the rumors I’ve heard of his temper.”
Sokka thinks of Prince Zuko’s face twisted up with wordless fury and silently agrees.
“Burning the face is used as a punishment for disloyalty in some parts of the Fire Nation, but not over the eyes like they say his is.”
Suki frowns, as if disgusted by the thought.
“Traitor scars are meant to brand, not to cripple. And, well,” she shrugs, “he’s the Fire Lord’s son, afterall. He’s no traitor.”
Sokka’s hands curl into fists and he stares hard at the woven reeds of the tatami mat, rage scorching at his insides.
A traitor scar.
A brand.
His spirit-chosen has been branded.
That would make sense. It’s something that the Fire Nation would do— brand prisoners, brand people , as if they’re cattle.
“Why did you ask?” Suki asks him after a moment and Sokka jerks his eyes up from where they’d been burning a hole in the mat.
Sokka works a finger under the edge of the bandages swathing his left arm and tugs until a sliver of red etched scales appear. Suki might not have a mark of her own, but her face twists in sympathy even before Sokka tells her that he’d felt it— felt what the Fire Nation had done to their face.
“Oh,” Suki gasps, looking vaguely horrified. Her warm brown eyes rise from the soul mark to his face. “Did you think…”
Sokka says the same thing to her that he’d told Katara, and he believes it. Afterall, from what he’s just learned, there must be thousands upon thousands of people with burnt faces in the world.
The Fire Prince’s scar is just too small.
⟢
He sees things when Hei Bai takes him into the Spirit World.
Things he’s not certain are real and things he's almost positive are. Things that happened, once, a long time ago, and things that will happen, sometime in the future. They all blur together in a jumble around Sokka.
A young boy whose face he doesn’t recognize, but whose molten yellow eyes are eerily familiar. There’s a disembodied hand wrapped around his wrist, and though Sokka can’t see its owner, he knows that it’s hurting him because the boy’s eyes are wet and there's a small bead of blood welling from his lip where his teeth have buried themselves deep in an attempt to remain silent.
He sees a shallow pond. Scattered across its glassy surface are the scorched and blackened carcasses of small animals. Sokka doesn’t recognize them, but from the ashen feathers, he thinks they might be some kind of bird. A child's cry of horror reaches his ears and then–
A dark hallway, barely illuminated by flickering red torches. The floor is a black volcanic rock, polished glossy, and heavy crimson drapes pour over the walls. A girl's voice echoes from the shadows, sing-song and pleased– “Dad’s going to kill you!”
He sees an open ring, an audience of shadowed jeering faces.
The deck of a metal ship, dusted in drifting soot.
Strands and clumps of thick black hair falling around his feet.
And seeping into all of it— every glimpse and scene and vision— is an unrelenting blend of fury and shame so intense that it makes Sokka nauseous.
When Katara and Aang drag him from the Spirit World the first thing he does is retch, right there in the dusty main square of the village. Around them, cries of joy ring through the air as people are reunited with their lost loved ones but Sokka just feels numb.
Desolate.
It takes all day to shake the remaining tendrils of that feeling from where they’ve wrapped themselves around him, and of course the moment he succeeds, there Avatar Roku’s temple is, rising from the sea like a lick of flame.
Sokka casts the last of his unease from his mind and focuses on the task ahead. His brief peace of mind lasts only a few more hours however, buoyed by the chaotic frenzy of their race through Roku’s Temple. It’s not hard to forget when magma–red and sweltering– is coursing in bubbling rivulets only inches away from his toes, or when Aang is flitting about without a care for the suffocating heat.
The Fire Sage guiding them proves reliable enough, and Sokka forgets about his odd dreams from Hei Bei’s lair until the exact moment that Prince Zuko storms out of the shadows, sparks jumping from his clenched fists, and puts an unfortunate end to the brief burst of luck that had allowed them to make it so far into the temple unnoticed by any hostile fire sages or soldiers.
And the thing is– it’s easy to misremember the Fire Prince.
With his furious pale face and his blazing yellow eyes and the fire that always flares into the air whenever they come across him, Sokka has begun to forget that Zuko is also just a boy. Spirits, when Sokka really stops and thinks about it, he realizes that he’s not certain that Zuko is even older than him.
When Admiral Zhao comes slinking out of the shadows at Roku’s Temple, he is suddenly reminded of that fact.
The Fire Prince looks so small compared to Zhao– like some sort of half feral snow cat– spitting and hissing, backed into the corner and– and desperate, Sokka realizes.
Prince Zuko is desperate .
Sokka doesn't understand how or why a Prince might come by such desperation, but he can recognize it when he sees it, and he may not be the brightest, but even he can tell that the burning hate in those golden eyes as they see Zhao is far more intense than anything that has ever been directed towards him or his companions.
There’s even a moment, when Zuko is lashed to a pillar opposite Sokka’s own, and his eyes are blazing with the strangest blend of rage and fear, that Sokka almost wonders if the firebender could be an ally to them. It’s clear that his hatred of Zhao far outstrips any negative feelings he’s shown for Sokka, or any other of their number for that matter.
A temporary alliance.
Sokka could work with something like that.
He eyes the Fire Prince furtively.
Zuko, unlike Sokka and Katara, has continued to throw himself against his bindings far past the point that it becomes obvious they won’t be breaking. He yells, trading between a litany of hoarse voiced insults and threats, both of which Zhao barely acknowledges.
Sokka can tell that being ignored is getting to the Fire Prince.
His pale face reddens in fury and he claws at his chains with his bare hands.
Sokka watches as one of his fingernails rips free from its bed, blood splattering the stones under Zuko’s feet. He can almost imagine that same pain echoed in his own fingers and a shiver of wrongness races down his spine.
“Hey,” Sokka whispers. desperate more than anything at this point, just to get the other boy to stop hurting himself in thoughtless defiance.
Zuko doesn’t hear him.
“Jerkbender!” Sokka hisses, a little louder.
Katara gives him an odd look from the corner of her eye but Sokka ignores her because finally– finally – he’s caught Zuko’s attention.
His head swings towards Sokka and he is once more reminded of the snow leopards back home. Fierce yellow eyes, lips drawn back in a snarl, that twisting burn scar made even more hideous under flickering torchlight.
Sokka remembers something then, for a brief flashing instant. The boy in his dream– the one who had been crying and hurt– his eyes were yellow too.
“What?” The Fire Prince snaps, jolting Sokka from his reverie.
He blinks, any hopes he’d had about their shared circumstances lessening Zuko’s aggression dissipating in an instant. Still, it’s worth a shot.
“You–” he begins, only to be interrupted by a bone rattling rumble. He never gets the chance to finish his sentence, because in the next instant the doors to Roku’s shrine blast open and the long dead spectre of the last Avatar is there, infernally bright and inimitably wrathful. The temple shakes and crumbles, rattled from its foundations by the ire of the very being it was built to worship, and in its wreckage, Sokka forgets all about desperate yellow eyes.
⟢
Jet understands him.
In Jet, Sokka almost finds a kindred spirit.
The rage— the hate— that fuels him is so familiar, so similar to Sokka’s own.
He shows Sokka his soul mark— a delicate branch of blush pink cherry blossoms curving over his shoulder— one day as they perch up in the trees, waiting for Aang and Katara to finish waterbending practice.
Sokka takes it in with narrowed eyes, entirely conscious of how significant this is, of what showing this to him means, and then Jet pulls his tunic back over his head.
“I felt them die,” he says, in a flat, careful voice. Like he’s said it a thousand times, but still can’t trust the words to make it past his lips without cracking and breaking apart.
Sokka unwinds the long strips of bandages from his left arm and bares his dragon to the komorebi sunlight flickering through the canopy above.
“Someone hurt them,” he says to Jet, in a similar tone to that which the other boy had used. “An ashmaker did. Bad. For a long, long time. Then, one day someone hurt them so bad I couldn’t feel them anymore.”
He conceals the dragon from sight again, wrapping his arm with practiced motions.
“They’re still alive though. Still out there somewhere.” His voice dips lower in admittance, “Hurting, probably.”
Jet rolls his stalk of wheat between his lips and watches Sokka with understanding eyes. Sokka watches him back, assessing.
He’s not angry when Jet betrays them. Or surprised, even. Aang and Katara are furious and hurt, but Sokka watches the red treetops of the Freedom Fighter's forest recede behind them from his perch on Appa’s saddle with a pang of regret.
If it weren’t for Aang and Katara, he thinks he might have stayed. His sister and the Avatar have each other, but until Jet, Sokka hadn’t ever met someone like himself. Someone for whom the twisted marks across their skin hadn’t ever meant the joy and love that the rest of the world seems convinced it represents.
He will before this is over, though.
He’ll meet so many people with painted skin and empty hearts. Living half lives without any hope of ever becoming whole. Others who spend their lives stricken with invisible, untreatable pain that is not their own.
Before this is over, Sokka will have met so many like him that their faces begin to blur together. But for now, he watches the treetops recede into the distance.
⟢
Aunt Wu has the most conspicuous soul mark that Sokka has ever seen.
Vines and flowers curve over top of her eyebrows, curling down into the space between them before trickling down her nose. They intertwine across her forehead until they disappear into her hairline and then reappear on her neck in swooping green tendrils.
Sokka tries not to stare but it's hard to tear his eyes away.
He’s never been one for superstition, but considering the soulmark curling up his own arm, he knows he can’t afford to disregard the spirits entirely. At least, that’s the excuse he gives himself for allowing Aunt Wu to read his fortune.
Her room smells heavily of incense, and sweet smoke clouds against the ceiling in swirling gray plumes.
Sokka tries to ignore the way it stings at his eyes as he takes a seat on one of the many overstuffed throw pillows littered across the floor.
Aunt Wu settles across from him with a knowing look in her eyes.
“You’re here about them aren’t you?”
Sokka stiffens, brow furrowing.
“Them?”
Aunt Wu nods to Sokka’s arm where it rests on his knee, to the layers of bandages swathing it, but he knows that what she’s really nodding to is what's underneath it.
The dragon.
Sokka’s palms feel sweaty.
He nods.
“Yes,” he confirms, still feeling a little ridiculous, “I’m here about them.”
She tells him to pick a bone, and when he does, she snatches it from his hand and casts it into the fire.
Sokka realizes then, what the incense is for, because as the bone scorches and cracks, the room fills with an awful acrid scent. He scrunches his nose in disgust, all while Aunt Wu remains perfectly unbothered.
After an apparently arbitrary length of time, the fortuneteller takes a long bronze prong and lifts the bone out of the fire. It’s ivory surface is spidered with cracks, and Sokka stares, trying to understand how at all that is going to tell him anything about his spirit-chosen.
Maybe Aunt Wu really is a fraud afterall.
Sokka tells himself it doesn’t really matter and watches as the fortuneteller inspect the bone he’d selected. Her brow furrows.
Sokka shifts uneasily on his pillow.
“Well?”
She waves a ring laden hand in his face, frowning.
“Shhh!”
Right. Okay.
Sokka sits back, fidgeting with his hands.
His eyes still sting. He blinks them a bit, scrubs at them with his knuckles. Nope. That didn’t help. What if–
“Your spirit-chosen,” Aunt Wu interrupts.
Sokka jerks to attention.
“They have already left their mark on your life.”
That’s– well, it’s not wrong per se… but hasn’t everyone’s spirit-chosen left a mark on them, even before meeting?
Sokka frowns, unimpressed.
“And?”
“You were not born with this mark of yours, were you?”
Sokka blinks, hesitating. The fact that Aunt Wu knows that is a bit more impressive, but that doesn’t mean that one of the others hadn't let the detail slip in their prior session with Aunt Wu.
“No,” he says slowly, shaking his head. “Why?”
Aunt Wu nods sagely.
“You have committed yourself to them, wholly and completely.”
It’s a little embarrassing to hear her say that with such certainty– to be made so vulnerable in front of a stranger– but she’s not wrong. Sokka winces but doesn’t interrupt. “But they are not the same as you,” Aunt Wu continues. “They have yet to accept the will of the spirits.” She purses her lips a little sadly. “And, my boy, I cannot promise you that they ever will.”
Oh.
Oh.
Sokka tilts his head to the side, brow furrowed, and lowers his gaze.
He supposes that makes sense.
Afterall, why would anyone who’s suffered the way he knows his spirit-chosen believe in a higher power? Who would want to live like that? Burnt and battered each day, all the while knowing that there was something powerful enough to stop your pain?
Sokka– he can see why– how– they might feel.
How they might reject it. The mark. The bond. Him.
“I haven’t felt them,” he admits quietly. “I haven’t felt them in over three years.”
Risking a glance up, he finds Aunt Wu’s face filled with sympathy.
“I see,” she says, and nothing more.
Sokka looks back to his hands, resting in his lap.
On his thumb, he can make out the scar from the time he’d caught his hand on a fishhook– only about a year after the dragon had appeared on his arm. He’d felt guilty over that for weeks, hated himself for having been responsible in any way for even more pain.
In the firelight, the shiny surface of the scar glints as Sokka’s fingers close into a fist.
His spirit-chosen– they might have given up on him. They might have never believed in him in the first place. But Sokka hasn’t given up on them.
He will do this.
He will travel with Aang and he will help the Avatar reshape the world into one in which no spiritmarks cause such senseless suffering as his own. And then– when it’s over, when the Fire Nations ruthless grasp on the world has been rebuked and the nations are free once more– he will leave and he will find them.
Sokka vows it on the scar etched across his hand.
He won’t give up.
⟢
Yue has soul markings of her own.
Sokka knows this.
He also knows that she knows about his dragon– that she’s seen more than she should with those wide, moonlit eyes, that she knows as well as he does that the spirits haven't meant them for each other.
She’s a princess after all. Beautiful and wise and kind. She’s the type of person that his people sing songs of– the ancient leaders and rulers of myth and legend. Her spirit-chosen must be someone magnificent. Someone important and powerful.
Still, Sokka wishes it was him.
It’s almost too easy, in those blissful weeks they spend at Agna Q’ela, to forget all about the world beyond the towering icy spires of the city's fortifications. Sokka trains with the warriors, heaving jawbone spear until his shoulders ache, and in the nights he slips away from the others and out onto the moonlit arches of Agna Q’ela’s many frost-worn bridges.
Yue is gentle and smart, clever in a softer way than anyone that he’s ever met. Sokka thinks– no, he knows – that he could love her. That it would be so easy. But every time he loses himself to her, there's a tendril of discomfort at the back of his mind. A hint of guilt. Of betrayal.
How dare he stand here on this frozen bridge under the clear northern moon and laugh with a girl who belongs to someone else? How dare his heart skip a beat when she smiles when he, too, belongs to someone else? How can he scrape together these small shreds of contentment while his spirit-chosen languishes in some Fire Nation prison, body no doubt littered with burn scars?
Sokka hates in those moments.
He hates the war, the Fire Nation, the greed and cruelty of others, just as he always has. But also he hates himself. He hates the spirits for marking him. He even might hate Yue a little bit, for being so bright and sweet and looking at him sometimes as if she, too, might decide not to care about the markings inscribed across her flesh.
In the months that come, Sokka will look back on these days of peace and self loathing and miss them with such furious longing that it will be like a punch in the gut. He will long for frigid mornings training at the walls, for frozen nights staring up at the ice castle towers and wondering who’s inside, for watching Katara and Aang train in secret with the crashing woosh of waterbending drowned out by the winter wind.
He will wonder why he didn’t realize how fleeting, how precious, these days are, but as is true of most things in this world, he doesn’t really appreciate it until it’s gone. Not until the Fire Nation fleet is a blot of ink bleeding across the horizon, not until soot rains from the clouds above, not until blazing missiles arc through the night sky obliterating Agna Q’ela’s proudest peaks– not until Aang is suddenly just gone.
⟢
When they find Aang, Prince Zuko is face-down in the snow beside him, half buried already by the gusting blizzard. There’s snowflakes collecting on his buzzed scalp, nestling themselves in the folds of his clothes, piling into small drifts against him.
Sokka sees the moment Aang hesitates, something uncertain crossing his face and he knows what’s coming next.
“Leave him,” he says, preemptively.
Aang shoots Sokka a disappointed look and turns back to where the fallen firebender lays.
“Be careful, Aang!” Katara cautions.
Sokka meets her eyes— wills her take his side with a look that’s roughly equivalent to ‘how about we don’t save the ashmaker who’s made our lives hell for months?’
It’s a lost cause.
She looks back over his shoulder to where Aang is attempting to lift the Fire Prince and her face softens. Sokka knows she’s remembering the cold— the time before they found Aang, before they knew why phantom shivers would wrack her body even under the warmest of furs.
Katara would never leave anyone to freeze, not even the Prince of the Fire Nation. Sokka makes a half-hearted attempt at stopping her anyway as she hops out of Appa’s saddle and she tugs her arm out of his grasp.
Together, Katara and Aang bind Prince Zuko’s wrists and drag him up onto Appa, where his unconscious form tilts until he’s slumping into Sokka’s shoulder.
He’s warm.
Sokka shoves him away, but when he does, the Fire Prince’s head falls to the side and Sokka finds himself staring straight into his scar.
It rises up into Zuko’s hairline in red tendrils and warps the top half of his left ear. That in particular catches Sokka’s attention. It looks bad. He wonders if the Fire Prince can still hear out of that ear.
Then he wonders why he cares— but, hey, that would be useful information in a fight. That’s all— that's the only reason he’d care.
But it doesn’t feel right to keep staring like this.
When he’s asleep, Prince Zuko’s face loses that horrible twist of rage. He looks even younger, more Sokka’s age than should be possible and the moonlight is unfairly flattering to his appropriately regal features.
Sokka reaches and hand out and uses the tips of his fingers to turn the Fire Prince’s face away.
He feels eyes on him then, and when he looks up, he sees Yue watching him– watching them.
Her gaze seems a little melancholy– flitting back and forth between Sokka and the unconscious ashmaker crumpled beside him. Sokka lifts a brow in her direction, gives her a small grin in an attempt to lift away the sorrow in her face.
It works– kind of.
At least, the corners of her lips twitch up in response, even though her eyes remain a little distant and a little pensive.
There’s no time to dwell on it, though. Not with Agna Q’ela appearing on the horizon– its icy spires reflecting firelight and twined with thick plumes of smoke.
The entire city is in chaos as they soar over it, and by the time they land, there is far too much happening for Sokka to spare a second thought for the Fire Prince– bound and unconscious– in Appa’s saddle.
He kills his first man that night– lifeblood steaming as it hits the ice– and that single action does nothing to quell the storm raging inside of him. Then Yue leaves him, and after that, Sokka struggles to think about anyone else but her for a long, long time.
⟢
Something changes when they reach Ba Sing Se.
Sokka doesn’t know what, can’t quite put a finger on why, but one day he’s lounging alongside Toph in the central room of their house in the Upper Ring, and he realizes that those barriers circling the edges of his mind are softer than he remembers.
The walls that used to seem impenetrable, that had scared him so much when they erected themselves– abrupt and impossible– between him and his other half, are weakened, wavering.
He frowns, staring up at the lazy sway of the ceiling fan overhead, and gives a gentle hesitant poke to that blocked bond.
Sokka isn’t quite sure what he’s expecting. A push back? For the walls to shiver and crumble? To recoil from him? He only realizes that he’s been holding his breath when nothing happens.
He pokes again.
Nothing, except well, the fact that he can actually touch it. The fact that he can feel it– that it’s there, a living, breathing, flickering thing. Like a weak candle flame, guttering in the winter wind, but still alive, still burning.
Hardly letting himself believe it– because why now, why here, after so long– he shoots upright.
His heart is thudding in his chest.
Toph tilts her head in his direction, grey eyes all seeing.
She lifts a brow.
“What?”
“N-nothing,” Sokka lies, entirely aware that she can see right through him.
She must realize that whatever’s caught her attention isn’t worth her while, because she wiggles her grubby fingers dismissively in his direction.
“Sure.”
Sokka drags himself to his feet and scurries upstairs to his room, mind racing. Once he’s inside he shuts the door firmly behind him and takes a long slow breath before settling on his bed. He closes his eyes, arranging hisnlimbs in a clumsy mimicry of the way he’s seen Aang sit while meditating.
He pokes the barrier again.
Again, nothing happens.
For a moment, he contemplates doing more than just poking. He contemplates shoving, battering, demanding, but the thought of doing that– of forcing his way through the walls that his spirit-chosen has erected– makes something in his chest twist. It feels off. Wrong. Like an invasion.
An abuse of power.
Sokka won’t visit upon his spirit-chosen the same cruelties that he knows with such certainty they have already endured.
He’ll wait.
He can be patient.
Katara would giggle at him, would ask when he has ever been capable of such restraint in his life, but this is different. Sokka’s father had only just begun to teach him to hunt when he left for the war, but Sokka still remembers those fragile, icy days spent laying in wait out on the tundra.
His father’s hand on his shoulder, his voice in his ear, cautioning.
A hunter is nothing without patience.
Sokka can be patient.
Sokka will be patient.
And so he is.
Days pass, blurring into weeks. Soon, he’s spent an entire month since the day he realized that the walls in his mind had weakened, and more than a month in the city itself. He finds it ironic that this place– this Impenetrable City with its towering walls of stone and earth– could be the place in which the walls within his own mind begin to crumble.
He waits.
He plasters “Missing Sky Bison!” posters across the entire upper ring and gently nudges against the barrier at the edge of his consciousness. He tries a thousand new varieties of street food and checks for cracks each night. He is more patient than he’s ever been in his entire life.
And it works.
The first time Sokka feels any sign of life from his spirit-chosen in three long years, he’s standing back to back with Toph attempting to fend off a company of Dai Li earthbenders in the caverns underneath Lake Laogai.
Jet might be dead. Somewhere behind him, Katara lets out an angry yell, the sound swallowed up by the wooshing of water. The air glows and eerie green, Sokka’s eardrums reverberate with the deafening crash of earthbending, and then something warm and right floods into his chest like the sweet honey syrup on those cakes that Aang loves so much.
He’s lucky that Toph chooses that exact instant to bend them to the surface, because the intensity of it, the unfamiliar familiarity , has his hand slamming into his chest and his knees giving out.
Aang gives him a mildly concerned look over a narrow shoulder but there’s no time– no time for him to ask, no time for Sokka to dwell on this new and devastating development– because in the next instant, the Dai Li soldiers are materializing before them, circling Long Feng like an ominous green cloud.
Sokka shakily pushes himself back to his feet, takes his place beside his friends, knuckles white around Boomerang’s sealskin grip.
Wouldn’t it be too cruel for this to be the end? To die or lose, here and now, having only just felt his spirit-chosen for the first time in years?
But the mellow depths of Lake Laogai lap at his heels, the crowd of Dai Li before them only grows as he watches, more and more operatives popping free from the soil beneath like truly reprehensible prairie cats. Sokka reaches for the bond at the corner of his mind, just for an instant. It’s warm under his touch. Bright and sweet and pulsing with life.
Staggeringly beautiful.
Wait , he tries to tell it– to tell them. Wait for me.
He wants to hold on, to close his eyes and lean in, but there’s no chance to listen for an answer. The Dai Li start forward, hurling earthen projectiles that shatter against Toph and Aang’s hastily erected shields and then an achingly familiar bellow is echoing from above.
Sokka hears Aang let out a small gasp.
He watches the others, friend and foe alike, tip their heads to the skies and then Appa is there, alighting amongst the Dai Li like a pale stormcloud, a flurry of animal grunts and blurred motion. Sokka has never been happier to see the sky bison in his life.
Everything that follows is as much of a whirlwind as Appa is. The Earth King, a foolish and sheltered lord of the final bastion of his nation. Long Feng, a cunning viper circling the city with asphyxiating intent. Days pass and Sokka doesn’t feel much of anything from the bond, though he clings to that first burst of heat and sweetness like a drowning man to driftwood. Days pass and then Aang dies. The city falls, walls crumbling under firebender technology, tanks grinding their way through towering sheets of stone and mortar. Sokka watches streams of red cloaked troops filter through the narrow city streets below, the wind of Appa’s passing buffeting at his face, the Avatar clutched limp and lifeless in his sister’s desperate arms.
He hates then, as much as he ever has.
As much as he did when Yue left him, as much as he did when Suki told him about traitor brands, as much as he did the first time a disembodied hand of fire ever wrapped around his wrist.
He hates, and then, just in case, he prays that his spirit-chosen has not found their way to the impenetrable city. He prays that his newly returned bond had not arisen out of proximity. For perhaps the first time in his life, he prays that they are far, far away from here.