Chapter Text
Despite the February draft in Bumi’s classroom that kept it almost unfairly cold, Sokka was sweating. He did the mental calculations quickly. Three questions left. He and Toph were 4 points behind Suki and Aang. So close, just a toss-up to tie it up. He realized he was doodling on his paper again, and clenched his ballpoint pen tighter to stop himself. He was almost out of room on his allotted two sheets.
Looking poised and calm despite reading questions fully decked out in her winter coat and hat, Katara took a breath and read through the next question, pronouncing each word carefully and clearly.
“Tossup, twenty-two. Earth and space. Short answer. Lake Vostok, an Antarctic subglacial lake, is thought to be a potential analogue for two bodies of astrobiological interest. Name one.”
Barely after she exhaled the final syllable of the sentence, before his brain even knew the answer consciously, Sokka buzzed in, feeling a savage flare of triumph when he heard Suki go at the same time and saw his own buzzer light up.
Katara nodded, acknowledging him. “Close to an interrupt, Sokka.”
He had been flirting with danger there, for sure. Crucial Rule of Science Bowl #1: only interrupt when you were certain you were correct. If you interrupted the judge and answered incorrectly, the other team got four points and a free opportunity to answer the question.
Sokka thought the question back through for one moment, definitely not 100% confident, but at least 85%. It was close, and the upside of getting this right and keeping the bonus out of Suki and Aang’s hands was too good to pass on. “Europa,” he guessed, remembering the ocean thought to exist beneath the icy layers of one of Jupiter’s bajillion (okay, seventy-nine) moons, the one that maybe could hold alien life.
“Correct,” Katara said, reading off the answers from the folder of questions from previous competitions that Bumi kept in a file cabinet. “The other one’s Enceladus.”
Toph reached her hand out to Sokka for a fist bump. He gave it to her, feeling the rush of pulling a correct toss-up out of nothing but vague supposition. Tie score. They were in this now, allowed to consult together on the bonus.
“Bonus. Short answer.” Katara tucked her hair behind her ears, then adjusted the hood of her winter coat. “Most sea ice exiting the Arctic Basin passes through what large strait between Greenland and Svalbard?”
“Ah, shit,” said Toph. “I know this. Starts with an F. The something strait.”
Sokka had no idea. They had twenty seconds to come up with an answer, just the two of them. Bonuses were always the same topic as their toss-up. “F… Frozen. Fjord. C’mon, Earth Science girl.”
“This is basically fricking geography. Flume?” Toph twisted her bangs around her finger like she always did when she was thinking. “Frame?”
“F… fuck.”
“Five seconds,” Katara said.
Sokka was captain, at least for this practice team session, so he had to give the answer. “Flume Strait,” he said. It was the best they’d come up with.
Katara shook her head. “Fram Strait. Close, Toph.”
“Fram? Come on, that can’t possibly be real.” Sokka said. He really shouldn’t be mouthing off so much. This was their last practice before regionals, and it was important to get the rhythms right: buzz, wait to be acknowledged, answer carefully. But goofing around heckling each other during practice was half the fun.
Katara rolled her eyes, pointedly moving onto the next question. Only two left. “Toss-up. Chemistry. Multiple choice.”
Shit. This wasn’t good. Chem was Suki’s domain. He glanced at his best friend out of the corner of his eye, the actual team captain when they were competing as a group against other schools. Suki’s paper looked organized, though from his desk Sokka could make out the small corner of the paper that she allowed herself some space to doodle while she thought.
Katara read slowly. “The degree of unsaturation of a hydrocarbon containing two rings is equivalent to the degree of unsaturation of a hydrocarbon containing, W: alkane, X: alkene, Y: alkyne--”
Suki’s buzzer lit up. An interrupt. She was feeling the pressure, too.
Katara gave Suki a long look, testing her. Crucial Rule of Science Bowl #2: wait for the judge to acknowledge you before you spoke, or you lost the chance to answer the question. Finally, Katara let her off the hook. “Interrupt. Suki.”
“Y,” Suki said carefully. Crucial Rule of Science Bowl #3: On multiple-choice questions, you had to either refer to the letter choice, or say the exact words of the response. No mumblings, no misspeaks, or those points were lost-- and the other team had a chance to answer, with the knowledge of what you had guessed.
“That’s correct,” said Katara. As she read Suki and Aang their bonus question-- the coefficients for water and carbon dioxide in the balanced combustion equation for octane, which Sokka couldn’t remember because it was mentally filed away under Suki’s got that one-- Sokka leaned over to Toph. “We’re in this. Need these next two,” he said.
Toph nodded grimly. Like Aang, Toph was a sophomore, but unlike Aang, this was her first year on the team at the somewhat underfunded school. She had come to the Omashu Magnet School for Engineering earlier this year. Aang had dragged her to Science Bowl practice when she showed up in his AP Environmental Science course as the only other sophomore, a blind fifteen-year-old who inhaled every audiobook, website, and podcast about glaciers, taiga biomes, and underwater volcanoes her laptop’s screen reader could deliver.
Suki had been impressed by Toph’s breadth of knowledge about Earth Science and courage on the buzzer. Sokka had been impressed by her flagrant disregard for all authorities she disagreed with. She was a rich kid, a transplant from the prestigious boarding school Sozin Academy, which she had been “asked to leave” (aka expelled from) after a few too many “unexcused absences” (aka skipping the classes she thought were boring and releasing one little colony of fire ants in her much loathed English teacher Mr. Zhao’s classroom). Now she was “kickin’ it public school style,” as she liked to put it.
She’d been a huge pickup, especially since the team would be graduating Suki and Sokka after this year. But she was a little raw. Sokka did what he could to try to explain the strategy along the way, but there was no teacher like experience, and that’s what she’d get at regionals this weekend.
“Five seconds,” Katara said.
Suki and Aang had been conferring in whispers. Suki nodded, tucked her hair behind her ears, read from her sheet. “Sixteen for carbon dioxide, eighteen for water.”
“That’s correct,” Katara said. “Next question--”
“Use our team name, Katara!” Aang said, grinning.
Katara rolled her eyes. “That’s correct, Aangular Momentum. Next question.”
Since it was the last practice before regionals, they’d thought about asking Bumi to read for them so they could all participate. But the problem with Bumi reading questions was that almost every single one spurred a tangent in his wandering brain, whether it was from his years of research on snake habitats, or his degrees in biology and geology, or just some bizarre theory his brain had concocted. It was fun, and damn did they learn some wild stuff, but today was all about replicating regionals as closely as possible.
That meant Katara was their reader, and Bumi was contentedly snoozing behind his desk, legs kicked up, chair leaned dangerously far back, emitting light snores. “Twenty-four. Toss-up. Biology. Multiple choice. Which of the following best describes how oxygen is stored in the muscles?”
Shit. Katara was the team’s anatomy and physiology whiz. Sokka was pretty good with neuro, but the musculoskeletal system was not his strong suit. He listened to the options. “W, spread throughout. X, bound to hemoglobin. Y, bound to calmodulin, Z, bound to myoglobin.”
Nobody buzzed.
Katara looked at all of them. “Really? Greek roots, people.”
Aang buzzed, waited to be acknowledged. “X,” he said after Katara nodded to him. This was his second year on the team. When he’d shown up as a bald, tattooed freshman last year after being homeschooled on the road his whole life by the monk who’d raised him (yeah, even Toph’s background didn’t hold a candle to Aang’s), Sokka had no idea what to expect. And it was true, Aang could be an absolute wild card. He had massive, seemingly random gaps in his knowledge, especially when it came to math. But he was fascinated by energy and knew more about renewables than anyone on the team, he inhaled new facts and knowledge like they were air, and most of all, he was quick to layer pranks, games, and bets into their practices.
Katara sighed. “Sorry, that’s incorrect.”
Thank you, Aang. Sokka slammed his hand down on the buzzer. He had been torn between X and Z. “Z,” he said, after Katara acknowledged him.
“Correct, Sokka,” said Katara. “C’mon, y’all, myo- is muscle.”
“I thought myo- was mushroom,” Aang said, crestfallen.
“Close, you’re thinking of myco-,” said Suki, never one to miss out on a teachable moment.
“Sorry, Suki,” Aang said flopping the hood of his heavy sweatshirt over his head and burying his face in his arms.
Suki patted his back. This wasn’t her first time around the block, and Sokka knew that as good as she was with Chemistry and as level as she stayed during stressful bonuses, this was what made her a great team captain: cool-headed and warm-hearted even when her teammates messed up. “No worries, kiddo, gotta shoot your shot sometimes.”
“Just read us our bonus, Katara,” Toph said, tapping her pen against the desk. They had decided on teams that morning in the groupchat-- making sure to split Sokka and Suki, the two seniors-- and had been trash talking pretty much since then. Toph and Aang had bet milkshakes on the outcome of today’s practice. Usually these were dollar bets, or bets like "loser has to lick Bumi's ball python", but they'd brought out the high stakes for the last practice before regionals.
Katara turned the page. “Bonus, biology, short answer. Name two cellular organelles besides the nucleus that contain a genome.”
“Mitochondria,” Toph and Sokka said to each other at the same time. Okay, one down. Mentally, Sokka flipped through his memory of the animal cell diagram in his biology textbook, listing organelles out loud as he went. Good teams always discussed bonuses. “Okay, ribosomes, lysosomes, Golgi thingies, smooth ER, rough ER… none of those have DNA, right?”
Toph blew the bangs that covered her eye out of her face. “Don’t think so.”
“Even Golgi bodies?” asked Sokka, mentally selecting that as his best guess if they couldn’t come up with anything else.
Toph shook her head. Sokka wanted to keep talking, which was how he sorted through his thoughts, but he’d found that Toph sometimes did her best when she had silence to dig back through her mental auditory encyclopedia.
“Five seconds,” Katara said.
Toph’s face lit up. “Wait! Fucking plant cells!”
Right. Chloroplasts had DNA. “Mitochondria and chloroplasts,” Sokka said to Katara, then couldn’t help but adding. “Hell yes, Toph.”
“Correct,” said Katara, grinning. “Watch your language, people, that’s not gonna fly this weekend. Okay, last question.”
“We’re tied, right?” asked Toph.
“Not for long,” said Suki, resting her hand on the buzzer. Sokka did too. Come on, Physics, he thought. That was probably the category where he had the biggest edge on Suki, other than anything related to Astronomy. But Astronomy was under the umbrella Earth and Space, and they’d just had an Earth and Space question. Sokka was pretty much the team's generalist though, so honestly, the more trivial and weird the question was, the better. Come on, come on...
“Toss-up. Energy, Multiple choice. Which of the following states has the highest potential for wind energy generation? W, Illinois. X, Arkansas. Y, Michigan. Z. North Dakota--”
Four hands slammed on buzzers, but the one that lit up was Aang’s. Dammit, Sokka thought, but even though they were enemies right now, he was glad the kid hadn’t let his previous wrong answer stifle his nerve. “Z,” he said confidently. They all probably could have guessed that one based on a little critical thinking, but Aang knew so much about climate science and energy efficiency that it wouldn’t surprise Sokka if he could rank all the states by wind energy potential.
“That’s correct,” Katara said. Aang and Suki high fived, two-handed, having locked up the question and the win with it whether or not they got the bonus.
Katara read it anyway, because Katara was a stickler. So while Suki and Aang scribbled calculations for a bonus question about converting kilo-watt hours into microwave time, Sokka turned to Toph. “We were close,” he said.
“Frickin’ Fram Strait,” she said, leaning back in her chair and kicking her legs up onto the desk in front of her. It never failed to impress Sokka how confidently she could inhabit the space around her despite her blindness.
“That was a dumb one,” he told her. “Not our fault. Sometimes it comes down to luck.”
He leaned back in his chair, too, looked around Bumi’s classroom, nostalgia settling over him like the snow settling over the streets, cars, and trees outside the window. This was going to be his fourth and last regionals. Outside of the two classes he’d had in here (AP Bio and AP Environmental Science), he ate lunch in here most days, and had had four years of Science Bowl practices to boot. The snake skeleton and dozens of spent snakeskins pinned to the corkboard, the pile of rocks stacked on the side table in interesting formations (that got re-stacked whenever they inevitably got knocked over by Bumi making too wild a gesture or a hapless freshman not used to the chaos), the sculpture of a glyptodont made of packing peanuts and duct tape that some seniors had made a few years back… it was all so familiar to Sokka, comforting in its disarray and discombobulation and draftiness.
Speaking of, he was cold now that his sweat was evaporating. Nature’s cooling system. He pulled his jacket on, the denim one lined with fleece. It was a hand-me-down from his dad, and though it had been mended dozens of times and smelled, faintly, of fish, it was one of his most prized possessions.
Suki and Aang got their bonus right. Toss-ups were worth four points and bonuses eight, leaving them twelve points in the lead. “Looks like milkshakes are on Toph, y'all,” Aang said, pulling the wool hat Katara had knitted him onto his shaved head.
Suki glanced at her watch. She'd had her one moment of celebration with Aang, now she was back to business. (Bumi’s classroom had three clocks, but none of them displayed the correct time.) “We should wrap up, anyway. I want us all getting plenty of good food and rest this week. That’s going to make way more difference than a few extra rounds on the buzzer.”
Sokka looked over at Bumi, who was snoring gently. “Bumi. Bumi!” he called.
The teacher opened one eye, not otherwise moving.
“You’ll be at the competition at eight am Saturday, right?” Sokka asked.
“What time zone?” croaked Bumi.
Sokka and Suki exchanged glances. With Bumi, you could never be more than fifty percent sure he was joking. He lived on his own planet. Hell, maybe his own plane of existence. “Well, Eastern Time,” Suki said. “The one where we live.”
“Just making sure,” Bumi said, finally kicking his legs off his desk and stretching. “In this day and age, you can’t be too careful.”
Sokka grinned. Okay, joke. “Any last advice for us as we prep for this weekend?” he asked.
Bumi thought for a long moment, stroking his long white beard. “Remember, if it kills you when it bites you, it’s venomous. But if it kills you when you bite it… it’s poisonous.”
“Is that Science Bowl advice or life advice, Bumi?” Suki asked, twinkle in her eye.
“Yes,” their coach said, yawning and closing his eyes once again.
Some teams had coaches that gave strategies, that took care of substitution, that read questions. They had Bumi. But to be honest, Sokka wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Okay, let’s get cleaned up and bring it in, y’all,” said Suki. Aang put away the buzzers while Katara reshelved the practice questions onto one of Bumi’s overflowing bookshelves. Once they were more or less regrouped, Suki led them in a guided visualization exercise. They had started closing their practices with this after Toph and Katara had gotten into a yelling match over the pronunciation of "Gondwanaland" a few weeks ago. It was a good way to relax together.
Sokka opened his eyes, peeking at the group, breathing extra loudly to make up for his indiscretion. Suki sat straight as an arrow, hands resting in her lap, as she guided everyone to take extra-long exhales “to activate the parasympathetic nervous system.” Toph lay on her back on the ground, head resting on her backpack. Katara had pulled the fur-lined hood of her coat all the way up and had her scarf wrapped around her neck, and Aang-- his eyes were open too, watching Katara, a goofy grin on his face.
Sokka cleared his throat. Aang jumped, closed his eyes again. Sokka grinned. He probably shouldn’t tease the kid-- he was so damn sincere and he followed Katara around like a puppy dog-- but it was too easy.
“All right, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to relax a bit,” Suki said. “Now before we head out... battle plans, co-captain?”
It was sweet, honestly, her insistence that she and Sokka were co-captains, despite the fact that during the competition itself teams could only have one designated captain. And Sokka had to admit, she was better in the captain’s seat when it came to bonuses-- listening to everyone’s ideas and her own intuition, distilling that chaos down into the best answer, and delivering it clearly and correctly.
But Sokka’s strength? That was marshalling the troops.
“You know it, Suki. All right, kids. Let’s talk battle plans,” Sokka said, distributing copies of the weekend’s schedule that he’d made earlier that day on the rickety old copier, with Bumi’s “borrowed” copier key. “This regionals is gonna be different from every regionals Suki ‘n I have seen before, and here’s why. This year, there’s two slots to natties on the line.”
Since out of the last three years, multiple teams from their region (aka Omashu Magnet and Sozin Academy) had placed in the top three at nationals, their region was now designated a “super region”, with two spots at nationals. When Bumi had forwarded that email to Suki and Sokka, they had screamed and danced around Suki’s mom's kitchen for a solid five minutes.
“Two spots to nationals means that we have some wiggle room,” continued Sokka. “If we'd had that last year, we'd have punched our ticket.”
Everyone in the room except Toph remembered that one, but she had been told the story numerous times. “So that means we could lose to Sozin and still make it?” she asked.
“We’re not losing to Sozin,” Sokka said, a little more sharply than he meant to.
Suki looked at him admonishingly, then spoke to the team. “We’ve prepared for this all year,” she said. “We just need to trust the work we’ve done, and walk in there with confidence that we’re the best team in the region. This extra slot to nationals is just extra padding. Padding that we helped earn when we got second at nationals me and Sokka’s sophomore year.”
Sokka tried to smile reassuringly at Toph, even though she couldn’t see it. “That’s… uh, yeah, that’s what I meant. We can beat any team in the region. Even Sozin. Especially Sozin. And we’ve got wiggle room if we need it. Which we won’t.” He was quickly losing his train of thought. Memories of facing up to Sozin Academy at Science Bowl regionals the last few years made his pulse race. But now wasn’t the time. Now was the time to support his team with a pep talk. “We just have to be confident on the buzzer and careful with interruptions.” Time to shut up before he went too of the rails. He glanced at Suki. “Anything else to add, co-captain?” he asked, as he always did, giving the spotlight back to his more rational-thinking friend.
Suki smiled at him, looked at Katara, Aang, and Toph, and let out a breath. “Let’s fucking do this,” she said, echoing her usual comment.
And with that, their last practice before regionals was complete. The transition back from Science Bowl Serious Mode to five nerds goofing around could commence. Scarves, hats, mittens-- mostly knitted by Katara-- were retrieved and doffed, parkas zipped against the February chill.
“So… heard a rumor about milkshakes on Toph for the winning team?” Suki said, pulling her hair out of the tight topknot she wore when she was concentrating, letting it bounce around her face.
“Yeah, yeah, milkshakes on Toph,” Toph grumbled. “A Beifong always pays her debts.”
“Plus one for Katara for being the reader,” said Aang.
“I’d rather get something hot,” said Katara. “I’m freezing. Tea?”
“Sokka, can you drive us?” Toph asked.
Sokka sighed, but he’d known this was coming. “C’mon, peeps. Let’s get in the truck.”
They left behind a chorus of goodbyes to their coach, and Aang’s left mitten. No matter. They'd get it back later. As regional champions.