Havi of the Earth Kingdom

Chapter 32: Bitter Work

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Havi's pov

"Good morning, earthbending student!" Toph yelled, waking me up. I'm not even learning earthbending, can she be quiet for just a few more minutes.

"Good morning, sifu Toph," Aang replied way too cheerfully for this early hour.

Katara sits up from her sleeping bag, "hey, you never call me sifu Katara."

"Well... if you think I should."

Sokka complains about the noise, what a shocker, and Toph whispers, "Good morning, snoozles. We'll do our earthbending as quietly as we can." She then bends the rock he slept on to send him flying in the air. When Sokka finally lands with a large thud, he starts ranting in some type of panicked gibberish before hopping away in his sleeping bag.

"So, what move are you gonna teach me first?" Aang excitedly asks, "rockalanche, the trembler? Oh, maybe I can learn to make a whirlpool out of land!"

"Let's start with move a rock." I follow Aang, Toph, and Katara to a large open space for practicing, "The key to earthbending is your stance. You've gotta be steady and strong. Rock is a stubborn element, if you're going to move it, you've gotta be like a rock yourself."

"Like a rock, got it" Aang nods.

"Good, now the actual motion of this one is pretty simple," Toph steps forward and punches towards the boulder in front of her, shoving it into the cliff nearby, "okay, you ready to give it a try?"

Aang gets into a stance, "I'm ready." He punches at the boulder but sends himself flying backwards instead.

"Rock beats airbender," Sokka laughed from the top of some mountain before standing up and leaving.

"I don't understand what went wrong," Katara says, "he did it exactly the way you did."

"Maybe there's another way. What if I came at the boulder from a different angle?" Aang suggested but Toph grabbed him by the collar to slow down.

"No, that's the problem. You've got to stop thinking like an airbender. There's no different angle, no clever solution, no trickity-trick that's gonna move that rock," she pushes Aang to the ground, "You've gotta face it head on, and when I say head on, I mean like this," She runs and crushes a giant rock with her head. That's gotta be a concussion right there.

"Woah!" Aang hangs his head sadly. Katara runs over to Toph and I go to follow along but someone stops me.

"Havi, can I talk to you about something?" I turn my head and see Sokka holding my elbow gently.

"Uh, I was watching Aang train. Can we talk about it later?"

He takes a step back to scratch the back of his neck, "It's kind of, um, important." I could feel his anxiety through the air so I just nodded along to go with him. He takes my hand and leads me back to camp, on the other side of Appa, where the others can't see.

"What is it? Are you okay?" I ask genuinely concerned while putting a soft hand on his shoulder.

"Yeah, I'm okay," Sokka grabs my hand from his shoulder and holds it down in between us, "I've been wanting to talk about this for a while now actually, but I didn't know exactly how to say it."

My stomach feels a little knotted, "O- Okay?"

He takes a deep breath, "I know you said that you wanted things to go back to normal, back to how they were before everything happened, but I don't think I want it to."

"What do you mean?" I ask skeptically.

"Havi, I," he pauses while searching my eyes. If I wasn't blushing before, I sure was now, "I like you. In a more than friends kind of way, and I've been wanting to tell you since forever it feels like and I know I blew it when I left you hanging after the hippie tunnel and then again at the swamp and I would understand if you were mad that I didn't bring it up but--"