School Time Fun (meghan&bethany)

Creative writing class, the bane of her existence. She wasn't very good with words and could never get her thoughts on paper. Besides, taking a writing class wasn't even her idea. Her parents signed her up for every extracurricular that didn't involve heavy lifting.

The teacher's nasally voice droned on without end and to be honest, she hadn't listened to a word of it until one little word caught her attention. Biography. Dread filled her entire being when she decided to finally listen to what he was saying.

"You'll be writing biographies!" Mr. Chang said, quite proud of his ingenious idea, "Yep. But not about a celebrity or some famous person. You'll be writing biographies about each other."

The was the brief hushed murmur of half of kids leaning over to whisper to their friends, excited to write about each other. The other half was quiet. Either friendless in that particular class or the kids that didn't have friends at all.

Toph just sank in her seat and put her feet on the chair legs of the person in front of her. Luckily, she knew that he'd never pair her off. Teachers usually didn't and she liked it that way.

Katara's pen moved back and forth, creating a deep line of darker and darker blue beneath the characters written above it. She was listening - pretty attentively but not hanging on every word - and decided to glance up when the assignment was being explained.

"I've assigned partners I believe you'll work well with in the long-term. This assignment will be due in four weeks and you will receive your biographies in bound copy. When I call your name, you may join your partner and adjust seating arrangements accordingly," Mr. Chang explained. Then he referred to the list and began to recite the pairs. Some of them were predictable and others elicited rude moans from one or both of the pair.

About half the class was paired off and Katara was still sitting in her seat, a little closer to the edge. It wasn't the worst assignment she'd been given lately.

"Katara," Mr. Chang said, approaching her seat by a few steps. "You'll be with Toph," he announced.

Oh. Katara drew a deep breath - getting ready - as she stood up and gave Mr. Chang a respectful nod. Her feet scuffed against the floor a little as she approached Toph's seat and took the empty one sometimes reserved for her aid. She waited in relative silence while the rest of the class was divided up. Then, when there was a returned hush, she tried to speak.

"Hi, Toph," she said, brightly and maybe a little stilted. Her teeth set anxiously in her jaw.

Toph didn't so much as turn her face to the other girl. She simply sat up in her seat to lean on her elbows. Why Katara? It must've been her sugary personality. She'd help the blind kid. Then again, she could hear even Katara dragging her feet to work with her.

"Hey." It was all she could bring herself to say after a long moment of silence. She flipped through an informational packet after it was passed to her and she vaguely wondered what it said.

It was probably questions that they had to ask their partners, such as, "Where were you born?" "Who are your parents?". She figured that it wouldn't take very long to just get through the questions and write out some garbage that would be just good enough.

"Hi," Katara repeated after a brief interval. She wondered why it seemed like someone could probably touch the tension in the air. 'Why do you hate me?' was probably not a good first question for an interview. It also was probably not true and at least a little melodramatic. Still, in the absence of that she had to keep thinking. Her thumb began to work at nothing on the edge of the furniture.

"So, I guess you'll get to see more of my brother. Just hope it's not too much of a distraction--" Katara stopped herself, not too abruptly but she was eying the surface of her notebook in front of her, considering introducing her forehead to it. So stupid.

Her cheeks reddened slightly at the mention of Sokka. Was she trying to get on her nerves? Was she making fun of her?

Nevertheless she turned her face to the other girl and smiled through a slight gap in her teeth. Her light freckles seemed darker with the pink of her cheeks. She held up the packet slightly to gesture toward it.

"What's all this say anyway?" She kept a tone of quiet optimism, something that she had practice at doing at home.

Katara caught her breath when Toph actually spoke through their mutual blushing. She wondered if she should clue her in that she'd been embarrassed too since Katara's vision placed her at a slight advantage in that area, but she decided it was probably best to push through it. It was probably better to just act like nothing was wrong.

She reached out and let Toph feel her take the other side of the packet to steady and angle it toward her eyes to read it.

"It's a schedule for the due dates for different parts of the project and a list of basic questions to 'help us get started'. We're also supposed to come up with some questions of our own that are good questions for the person whose biography we're writing after we learn more about them. A half page response is due in a week," she explained after skimming.

"Hey, we might even have a head-start on some of these people, right?" she suggested, doing her best to sound equally optimistic.

"I have more of a head start than you do." She teased, giving a wry smirk.

She knew a few things about Katara from hanging around Aang and Sokka. For one, she knew that Katara's mom died. And two, something she learned from Aang, was that Katara had a soft spot for animals and kids and that she was basically the perfect being. She never really had the heart to tell the boy o talk about something or someone else for once.

"A half a page in a week is nothing. You could just fill that up with stuff like "Who are your parents?" and "Where were you born?", you know, stuff like that." She was pretty confident that the assignment wouldn't be like pulling teeth unless her partner made it harder than it had to be.

"That's just the first part of it," Katara clarified, stomach sinking just a little when she realized she hadn't been clear. She just hoped Toph didn't think she was being deliberately cryptic. "And it's supposed to be specific... to who we are. The assignment is to... get to know each other."

Then her brow furrowed as she considered the implications of what Toph had said.

"Wait a minute," she insisted. "What does that mean?" she asked, not quite complaining.

"Nothin'," She said as she took out a pencil to write her name on the packet, "Aang's mentioned you before. Just once or twice. And besides, I'm friends with your brother and you can't tell me that he doesn't gossip."

Her writing was neat and print-like as she put her name, the due date and the class on the top of the paper. She sure knew a lot more about Katara than Katara knew about her, not that she'd tell her specifics or talk about her behind her back. Just the knowledge was enough.

Besides Katara, she knew about a lot of people. Students and adults tended to act as if she wasn't there and have the most personal conversations even if she was sitting right next to them. She knew that the janitor and the principal were cheating on their husbands to be together, she knew that one of the most popular jocks in school was planning on taking ballet classes and going to an art college.

She didn't mind knowing about everyone and everything but it did make her feel invisible sometimes.

"What kinds of things did my brother say?" Katara asked lowly. She wouldn't ask about what Aang had said, though she fidgeted just a little at the thought. She reached up, playing with the end of her braid. The idea that Aang would just talk about her wasn't particularly upsetting. It was just... sweet.

Sokka, on the other hand.

"You brought it up," she said, a little playful and goading, but there was still an edge to her tone - an edge meant entirely for Sokka the next time she saw him.

She shrugged a little as she drew small, perfect shapes on the paper, "Uh...Nothin' much."

It was hard to find just one thing to tell her. Sokka did talk a lot and all the time when she came over to his house. Could she tell her that Sokka read Katara's middle school diary to her? It could be funny...

"He kind of read part of a diary to me. There wasn't anything too bad in it...except your crush on Hu Wei in middle school." She couldn't hold back her laughter.

Katara's blood seemed hotter all through her body, and she thought she might have been able to call the water from the fountain at the front of the school and have it seek out Sokka like some kind of guided missile for a moment. Not that she would try it. She wasn't that irresponsible.

Her eyes narrowed as she looked down at what Toph was doing. She took a sharp, seething breath that she blew out through her nose.

"What are you drawing?" she asked, trying to provide a conversation topic. Then, she casually put in: "What I said - a few minutes ago - about this project giving you a chance to see my brother more? I regret to inform you, but that's changed. My brother is going to be dead before you get the chance. My condolences."

"I'll come to his funeral." She shrugged, "Unless there isn't going to be a body for a funeral."

She showed Katara her geometric drawings and adjusted their positions on her page with bending until they were in the shape of a cat, "A cat."

She didn't look like it, but art classes were her favorites. Mostly because she got to use her bending to make things and the attention that people gave her over it wasn't bad.

Katara watched, leaning against her elbow as Toph manipulated the art. The heel of her hand pushed back against her hair a little and she was wowed enough to spend a moment in silence, searching for words.

"That's great!" she finally came up with. "How do you--"

Then she stopped, almost wincing. She didn't know if it was offensive and she felt like she should have. Her teeth clenched a little, a foot scuffing against the floor beneath her seat.

"I'm an Earthbender, dummy." She said teasingly. She could feel Katara's discomfort in acknowledging that Toph is indeed blind but chose to ignore it, it was a perfectly normal reaction.

"The pencil lead is technically Earth so I can move it how ever I want to." She got into her backpack that laid on the floor under her chair and pulled out a notebook. "Think we should get started or something?"

She opened the notebook and wrote at the top of the page "Katara" with a line underneath it.

Katara's eyebrows did a little rise and fall, wavering motion up and down her forehead, not quite sure whether she was lifting them or frowning with concentration. She nodded, taking in the answer, and doodled Toph's name on her own paper.

"Well, since you're in such a hurry," she tried to tease. She searched for a question. Most of the simple ones that occurred to her - 'What's your favorite color?' - didn't work for obvious reasons. She managed to avoid putting her foot immediately back in her mouth.

"... Best memory," she said. Friendly and light might work to ease some of the awkwardness that Toph kept acting like she didn't feel.

She stared blankly at her notebook for a long moment. Best memory.

It would probably be the moment that she could see with Earthbending. The second that the darkness gave way to light and the world around her began to breathe with life and motion. And the fear faded away.

Not that she'd get personal with a girl she hardly knew...

"I'd have to say that my best memory is when I discovered Earthbending." Her pale eyes looked to Katara with a strange accuracy, "I learned from Badgermoles."

Katara blinked a few times and watched Toph's eyes. Apart from the muted nature of the color, the relative stillness, with her gaze like that it was difficult to remember that she couldn't actually see her. She held her gaze anyway, pen coming up to the corner of her lips. She tapped her mouth with it and then started to arc the nib down toward her paper.

She doodled a little along a margin, writing nonsense for a moment as she considered it.

"I... heard a story about that once," she said, a little whimsical. "About the first Earthbenders.It was... sort of romantic," she said, not quite leading.

"Oma and Shu? I guess it's romantic even though he died." She scoffed a little dismissively, "What kind of love story is that?"

She rested her head on her hand, "My parents don't believe me about the badgermoles. They say that it's just a legend."

She couldn't help but let a tone of resentment seep into her tone of voice. While she couldn't say that she hated her parents, she did have some mixed feelings about them.