The Spirit Bender

23. Caught

"if they act like they can live without you. let them."

-

"I can't believe those girls followed us all the way from Omashu," Katara muttered once we were in the air again.

"I still think we could have taken them," Toph said, clearly in a grumpy mood.

Katara turned to Toph. "Are you kidding me? The crazy blue firebending and the flying daggers are bad enough, but last time we saw them, one of those girls did something that took my bending away. That's scary."

I looked down, remembering the fight with Azula in Omashu. She had almost won then, I wouldn't let that happen again. I looked away and closed my eyes, begging for a little sleep.

But when the sun rose, we were still flying. Most of us unleashed displeased groans.

"Oh no, the sun is rising. We've been up all night with no sleep!" Sokka complained.

"Sokka, we'll be okay," Aang calmly said.

"Are you sure? I've never not slept before!" Sokka leaned forward nervously and held his hand to his head. "What if I fall asleep now and something happens? And something always happens!" he freaked out.

"Every time we land, those girls are there. So we'll just have to keep flying," Katara reasoned.

"We can't keep flying forever," Aang commented. He yawned. "So what's our plan?" he asked.

Toph slumped against the saddle. "Don't know ... too tired to think," she said.

"I'm sure we'll come up with something after a short nap," Katara optimistically said.

"Yes ... sleep," Sokka trailed off relieved.

However just as he said it, we began loosing altitude. I grabbed onto the saddle tightly in fear of falling completely off. 

"What's going on?" Toph frantically yelled.

"We're loosing altitude!" I yelled back. "Why?"

"Appa fell asleep!" Aang yelled back, and crawled over to the bisons head, trying to force it to wake up. Fortunately for us and our lives, Appa woke up just before we crashed. He soared a little across a river before crash-landing.

"Well that's just great. Now we'll definetely never escape them," I commented upon landing on the ground.

"Appa's exhausted," Aang said.

Sokka grabbed his sleeping bag and trudged across the field they landed in. "Okay, we've put in a lot of distance between us and them. The plan right now is to follow Appa's lead and get some sleep," he said.

Katara and I grabbed our own sleeping bags from the saddle. "Of course, we could've gotten some sleep earlier, if Toph didn't have such issues," Katara mockingly said to Toph who was laying on the ground half asleep.

She however woke up at that and slammed the ground, yelling furiously. "What!?"

"All right, all right, everyone's exhausted! Let's just get some rest," Aang reasoned.

But Toph just rose and faced Katara. "No, I want to hear what Katara has to say. You think I have issues?"

"I'm just saying. Maybe if you helped out earlier, we could have set up our camp faster and gotten some sleep," she first said irritated, till she began shouting, "and then maybe we wouldn't be in this situation!"

"You're blaming me for this?" Toph asked, enraged.

Katara threw away her sleeping bag, gesturing with her hands challenging Toph.