Notes: this one was for a prompt from Lysapadin.

1. Blood ties

These are things that Toph might consider regretting, on a bad day after a long-distance fight down the telephone cables that they say are meant to bring people closer together: that her parents have never once in their lives been able to see her as she perceives herself; that she agreed to have a telephone installed in the first place; that the conversations she has are one-sided and stiff and that no-one else involved seems to make any effort to understand what she tries to say, to interpret the fucking meaning instead of just listening to the words.

But through all of that she can't regret the person she is, and so she can't regret her family, though they're awful and manipulative and don't know the first thing about boundaries. In another family she'd have become another person. And that other person would probably have been pretty neat too in their way, but there wouldn't have been Aang or Katara, Sokka or Suki.

Her blood family has pushed her to find her family of choice. What's to regret there?

2. Suki

It's possible that the moment on their way in to Ba Sing Se will haunt her forever: ice and water and falling, disorientated, and the ridiculous tone in her voice; Sokka, you saved me! It flashes up into the front of her mind sometimes, completely unbidden, and makes her want to beat her head against the wall until she can only hear the roaring in her ears. Is it normal to want to hide under a rock because of some dumbass thing you said when you were a kid?

But still, she can't quite regret it, because she also remembers Suki's arms tight around her, breasts pressed against her back, and she didn't really think about sex back then, but when she got there a few years later it came back, again and again - it wasn't the only thing she thought about, but it was a theme for a while, a favourite starting point for idle fantasies. Even though she was pretty sure she liked Sokka, too; even though Sokka and Suki were a couple and also her friends.

There are other reasons not to regret that starting point: Suki's arms around her and Sokka's hands on her thighs, a gasp of laughter against her neck and a mouth pressed to her hip, curled into a smile. Freedom to come and go, but a place to return to; idle conversations late at night, do you remember when we were stubborn kids who thought we knew everything?

Suki, thoughtful; I always liked you, I think. You seemed so much cooler than me. I'd have been so scared of you, if it wasn't for...

What?

Never mind. It's nothing.

But she thinks she knows.

3. Duty

When she was offered the police force they had to wait until she'd done laughing to even manage to get the whole question out, and all that did was set her off again.

And she was kind of right: the idea was fucking ridiculous, the responsibility tugs at her and wears her down sometimes, and she knows she needed to spend about five times as much time at a desk as she actually does but she just really, really hates dictating, and hates having reports read out to her in the steady drone of the uneasy reader even more. She could scream at the whole thing half the time, and at Aang for making it impossible for her to refuse it, even if he's never seen it like that.

But then there are the other times, when she can lay out her evidence like a map, string it together with insight that leaves no room for argument. She has always waited and listened, and now she extends the principle, stretches it over an entire city. She knows her timing is perfect. She can hardly imagine, any more, what else she'd do.

4. Republic City

It isn't as though she can't feel the effect the city has, the way the weight of it pulls at the world around it, spreads itself and raises itself up at a speed that should be frightening. The gravitational heart of the Earth Kingdom has always been Ba Sing Se, it's always pulled all the roads to itself, but Republic City has a silent ambition to become the gravitational centre of the world. She can feel it dreaming about greatness, under the rumble of the trains and the roar of industry. And she dreams with it, even though she feels the danger that might be there.

She spreads her hands on the maps that Sokka makes for her, clever jigsaw-puzzle things of metal and wood, contoured and smooth. The lines of the coast, the mountains rising around. The steady shift of shipping routes to centre on the city and the way the railway lines spread outward, form a spider-net with the republic at its core.

We've made something so big that it can't be stopped, she thinks, and we made it too fast, in a crisis.

It should worry her, but all she feels is a spiraling elation, like hurtling down the side of a mountain with an avalanche behind might feel, running and running and knowing that she can't stop or stumble or fall.

This is her city, and she'll keep running, holding everything just barely balanced, as long as she breathes.

5. Lin

"Did you even mean to have me?" Lin asks, seriously, vaguely accusatory. The conversation is a wreck; the catalogue of questions Lin has been saving up for a special occasion is apparently extensive, and today has been arbitrarily chosen as the happy day. But why isn't Sokka my dad, then, may have been the crowning glory from an objective point of view, but this one hits a nerve.

"No," Toph says too sharply, and then more gently, "look, being pregnant is really annoying, and I never even thought about if I wanted it or not before. It just happened. But you tell me even once that I love you less for that and I will kick your arse next time we train. With love. Obviously."

She thinks Lin is rolling her eyes, probably, which means they're almost safe.

And yeah, she's done plenty of stupid things in her life, about half of which her daughter has just systematically managed to remind her of. But really: anyone who thinks she could possibly regret Lin's existence basically has to be an idiot.

[fin]