"We're going to the beach this Friday. Ember Island. Sokka rented one of those cabana things with the umbrella and the chairs. Toph's coming too—she's my friend, you'd like her, she's—well, she's Toph. She's a lot. In the best way."
The beach.
Ember Island. Full sun. Bright, white, merciless sun reflecting off sand and water.
The sand—itchy, granular, the kind that gets into everything, into the spaces between fingers and toes and the creases of clothing, impossible to shake.
The screaming—the particular high-pitched, relentless shrieking of human children playing in water, a frequency designed to shred every nerve ending in a body that's already running on borrowed energy.
The sensory assault of it—every nerve ending I possess screaming at once, the ancient cellular warning that daylight is poison, that exposure is torture, that every minute spent under the sun is borrowed from the finite reservoir of energy I'll need to replenish later.
An entire day. Exposed. No shadows to hide in, no buildings to duck between, no jacket thick enough to block the light when the sun is directly overhead and the umbrella is a joke against the angle of the rays.
My skin is already prickling at the thought of it—a deep, cellular warning that intensifies the longer I let the image play out. The sun will feel like needles. Like fire.
I picture myself on a towel in the full glare of noon, my skin prickling and burning beneath the thin veneer of day-walking resilience, surrounded by people I don't know, trying to pass for human while every molecule of my body screams for darkness.
It sounds like a nightmare. Like actual, sustained, deliberate torture. The kind of thing Azula would laugh about for a century.
"I'd love to," is what I hear myself say. "What time?"
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