"Toph, can I have a word?"
Kanto took her by the arm and gently led her away from the man she had been talking to. The other patrons of the bar were chatting loudly, while the quietest of the bunch appeared to be engaged in intense tongue wrestling matches in the bar's more secluded booths. Kanto had had a few drinks by this point and seemed to be working on yet another, so Toph figured this was not likely to be one of their usual bar scene make out sessions.
"What's wrong?" Toph asked with a flirty grin. She put her own drink down on the counter and placed one hand flat on his chiselled chest.
"It's just, I don't think I like the way you were talking to that guy..."
"We were just talking," Toph responded. Her grin faded and she let her expression harden. "I'm allowed to talk to other guys you know."
"You were flirting."
Toph applied pressure to the hand she had on his chest and felt him stumble back slightly. His stance was unstable.
Which is what makes him such a terrible earthbender, she thought bitterly.
"I was not flirting!"
"Then what would you call that?" Kanto asked, gesturing towards the man she had previously been chatting up. He was apparently in the process of buying another woman a drink.
"Talking! We were talking. He wanted to hear stories about the war!"
"You hate telling stories about the war!"
"Well sure, but I love talking about how awesome I am! You know that." Toph grimaced when she noticed a few nearby people turning their heads to look at them. The immediate vicinity had grown slightly more quiet. "Can we talk about this somewhere a little more private?"
"Fine."
"I'll just let Ling and Heng know we're heading out..."
In the house, Kanto turned and opened his mouth to speak, but Toph grabbed his shirt and pulled him close. "Talk later," she said, before pulling him into a passionate kiss. Kanto didn't argue as he began to peel the shirt off of her shoulders. Toph could feel his erection pressing against her through his pants.
"We make a terrible couple," Kanto said. He was lying on the bed next to her, the both of them completely out of breath. Toph laughed heartily.
"Duh! But what we just did there? That's what makes us so great! I swear our bodies were made for each other."
"I want more than just sex, Toph."
Toph felt him roll over and sit up as she lay on her back, still catching her breath. Suddenly the sticky feeling on her bare skin felt wrong on so many levels."What are you saying?" she asked.
"I want a girlfriend who respects me, who doesn't cheat on me-"
"I never-"
"I want a wife."
Toph blinked, but otherwise didn't move. "Oh."
"Goodbye, Toph." Toph heard him stumble out the bedroom door.
Toph groggily came to her senses. She was lying on something soft, her back pressed against something similarly soft. A sofa? Where was she again?
The air smelled strongly of fish and there was a patter of small feet accompanied by the nearby squeal of a happy child being chased by an older sibling. Right. She had taken a nap at air temple island after a healing session with Katara.
And of course she had to go ahead and have a dream about sex, without the actual sex. Toph's subconscious really needed to get its priorities straight.
"Gotcha!" she heard Bumi yell from right behind her.
"No!" was Kya's reply. There was a scuffle and a thump, and then the small feet were fleeing into another room.
"Hey!" Bumi shouted, as he disappeared as well.
"Toph, I'm so sorry! I told them not to come in here."
"It's okay," Toph said with a yawn. She sat up slowly and planted her feet firmly on the ground. Katara was standing in the hallway that led to the kitchen. It must have been almost time for dinner.
"How are you feeling?" Katara asked.
"Tired. Hungry." Toph stretched as she leaned back.
"That's good. The food should be ready soon." Katara always insisted on Toph staying for dinner after her healing sessions. Toph was going to have to stay there for a bit anyway to make sure she wasn't going to have any issues, so a routine was beginning to form where Toph would take a nap after their session and then they would all eat together. It was nice, and it gave Toph an opportunity to get some practise parenting in with Tenzin.
"Hey, you don't think Kanto would..." Toph trailed off. Katara had been about to leave the room, but she turned around, her heartbeat picking up in worry.
"Toph, we talked about this. You and Kanto-"
"I know. I don't want to get back together with him. I just think, if he were to come back to Republic City, he could be involved. You know?"
"You told me you don't know where he is."
"I could find him."
Katara leaned against the doorframe as she crossed her arms. "What brought this on?" she asked.
"My kid has no father," Toph said. She ran a hand over her hair, attempting to flatten out the bed head from her bun. "And I guess it would be nice to not have to do this on my own. But he might not believe..." Toph trailed off.
"What might he not believe? That the child is his?"
Toph shrugged. She heard Katara take a deep breath.
"Toph, why wouldn't he believe the child is his?" There was warning in Katara's tone.
Toph was silent as she contemplated how to phrase what she had to say. "I may have... cheated on him," she said eventually. "I think he knew. That's why he left."
"Toph!"
"I slept with Guo."
"Oh spirits..." Katara rubbed at her face with the palm of her hand. "Why would you-"
"Kanto and I didn't exactly have the perfect relationship, okay? The sex was good, but we didn't really connect in any other way. Guo understands me better. I gave it a shot, it was an awful experience..." Katara was glaring at her, but Toph didn't care. "It was over a year ago. I felt really guilty about it and it never happened again."
"Did you tell Kanto?" She could hear the anger in Katara's voice.
"No. But I think he figured it out on his own. We never really talked about it."
Katara sighed. "You're an amazing person, but sometimes... you're just really, really awful. You know that, right?"
"I know. I already told you how guilty I felt, right?"
"How could you do something like that? Why didn't you just break up with him?" Katara was gesturing wildly with her hands, a sure sign that Toph had pushed her over the edge. She should've kept her mouth shut. Screw confessions.
"The sex wasn't just good," Toph said. "It was fantastic! I didn't want to give that up and I'm never going to find that with anyone else."
"Okay, you know what? You do what you have to do." Katara shook her head. "If Kanto wants to talk to you that's great for you, but it sounds to me like you don't deserve it!"
"I felt really guilty-"
"Feeling guilty isn't good enough, Toph! What you did was really bad, and now there's the possibility that somebody else has to pay for your actions!" Toph's hand strayed to her belly.
"Dinner's going to be ready real soon," Katara spat, turning away from the conversation at hand. "You might want to start making your way to the kitchen."
Toph was getting the silent treatment from her friend. They still had their weekly healing sessions, but the caring "Tenzin baby practice" interactions were all but gone. Toph was still welcome at dinner, but Katara barely talked to her. Aang still chatted away, though Toph could tell he was disappointed as well.
She tried burying herself in her work to ignore the guilt. She could now read and press her own name fairly quickly in Braille, though Guo had picked everything up a lot faster and appeared to be leagues ahead of her. He had taken up transcribing some of her police reports for practice, though it took Toph so long to read anything it was hardly worth the effort.
It was a couple of months before Toph was able to actually muster up enough courage to act on her previous desire. She was quite clearly pregnant now, and had had to alter her armour to compensate since there was no way Toph Beifong was going to work without her full uniform. She wasn't in uniform at the moment though, having donned a long flowing top and a pair of stretchy pants that her mother had helped her pick out when they'd gone shopping together. She probably looked horrendously girly, but it wasn't like Toph's normal wardrobe included mid to late stage pregnancy sizes.
She trudged up a flight of steps in the musty stairway of an apartment complex. She knew this area of town was notorious for drug dealing and the Chief of Police probably wasn't an overly welcome sight, but there was someone here she needed to talk to. She rapped smartly on a door and felt the apartment's resident rise from where he'd been lounging on the sofa. He opened the door and then tried to shut it quickly when he saw who was on the other side.
"Shit!" he hissed, noticing that Toph had bent a doorstop to prevent him from shutting her out.
"I need to talk to you," Toph stated calmly.
"I didn't do anything!" he insisted.
Toph paused, raising an eyebrow at his quickened heartbeat. "Well that's a lie," she stated. "But I just came here to talk to you about your brother." She could smell a hint of smoke inside his apartment. The man had been lighting something on fire... "You're high."
"Am not!"
"Lying again! That really is a piss-poor use for firebending, don't you think?" Toph stated cheerily.
"Please don't arrest me again!" His breathing was dangerously rapid and Toph could feel the panicked pounding of his heart.
"Calm down, I'm not going to arrest you. Besides, I make a terrible eye witness." He didn't respond, instead he glanced nervously at the table behind him. "Get it? Cause I'm blind?"
"Look, Kanto doesn't want to see you anymore, okay? And frankly, neither do I." He tried to pull the door closed again, apparently having forgotten that Toph had it blocked. "You can't come in! You don't have a warrant!"
"I don't want to come in. Just tell me where Kanto is."
"No."
"He has a responsibility to his child," Toph said, her voice hardening. The man seemed to notice her protruding belly for the first time and it gave him pause.
"Kanto says it's not his." He tried to pull the door closed again and then glared at the hunk of stone keeping it open.
"So you've been talking to him. Is he in town? Do you have his phone number?"
"No! Yes... please, just leave." Somebody down the hall opened their door a crack and then snapped it shut rapidly. Her presence wasn't going to go unnoticed for much longer.
"It is Kanto's kid and I want to know where he is."
"He won't believe you. And I'm not going to tell you anything so you might as well go, before someone around here is stupid enough to try anything." Toph opened her mouth to retort, but the man beat her to it. "You know someone will."
Toph snorted in irritation. "Fine," she said, stomping her foot on the ground. The doorstop she'd made sunk back into the floor and the man quickly shut the door before Toph could change her mind.
"He had to get a date with the Chief of Police when he paid my bail..." she heard the man mumble on the other side of the door as he walked away.
"Oh, this one's good," Sokka said. He was holding a newspaper and staring at something on it with a stupid grin on his face. There was a small stack of newspapers in front of him that he had saved up for their special dinner. "You look like you ate something really sour. Great expression. You should definitely try that one again."
"Would that I could," Toph mumbled as she snapped up some noodles with her chopsticks.
"Hey, it's not as bad as the press conference you called to announce your pregnancy," he stated. "But it's still pretty bad."
"I was in a lot of pain that time!"
"Ya ya," he said, dropping the paper next to his empty bowl. Toph listened to the rustling of paper as he lifted up another one and flipped through the pages until he had found yet another picture of her. "Wow, the press sure does love taking awful pictures of you lately." He was quiet for a moment, which made the sound of Toph slurping at her broth all the more audible. She felt him tilt his head. "Oh ya, this one's going on the wall."
"That bad?" she asked, mouth full. If her mother were present, Toph would be getting a very stern scolding about now.
"You don't even want to know."
Toph finished off her third bowl of noodles and pushed it aside, resting her chin in her hands. Sokka was in the process of cutting out squares from the newspapers he was scouring. He had turned a portion of her kitchen wall into a collage of terrible pictures of her. It was a harmless little bit of fun since Toph didn't have to look at them, and people who visited seemed to find it amusing. Plus, Toph knew only people with the biggest egos had that many pictures of themselves in their homes, and Toph needed some way to show off just how enormous her own ego really was.
"Somebody sent me a crib today," she said.
"Oh ya?" Sokka asked, only partially paying attention. He bit his lip in concentration as he cut an intricate shape from the paper. It was the shape of Toph's body, with her hands seemingly on her hips. "That was nice of them."
"I sent it back. Who knows who sent it."
"What, you think someone's going to send booby trapped baby gifts?" Sokka asked. He looked up briefly from his work and quirked an eyebrow.
"I'm the Chief of Police," Toph said. "I have enemies. I swear I'm going to birth a baby with a giant target on her head!"
Sokka placed his scissors on the table and fixed Toph with a stare. "Promise me you won't become an overprotective mother," he said.
"Oh please, like I'm going to be that kind of mom." Sokka stared at her quietly but Toph pointed one grimy finger at his nose. "Look, I'm going to be as protective as I need to be and no more. I'm not going to coddle my child like my parents coddled me."
"And who's going to protect the baby while you're at work?"
"I don't know, a nanny?" Toph dropped her head into her hands.
"You need to think about these things."
"I know!" Toph said, her voice muffled. "I just..."
What did Sokka expect from her? She was one person being thrust into something she never wanted anything to do with in the first place. Toph still had massive doubts about her ability to even be a mom, especially since the majority of her parenting decisions so far revolved around things she intended not to do as a parent. And she couldn't even find the baby's father.
Toph's silence was apparently telling, because she soon found Sokka's hand on her arm.
"Katara told me you were trying to find Kanto..."
Toph sniffed. She hadn't noticed how runny her nose had gotten over the past few seconds. "What else did she tell you?" she asked.
"Um..." Toph wiped at her eyes as Sokka floundered, because her eyes were also showing signs of her turning into a weepy mess. "She mentioned the whole cheating thing." Toph flinched. "But I'm not going to judge you for that! Okay? You're getting enough of that from my sister."
"So what are you going to judge me for?"
"Nothing! Toph, I'm here to help you!" The hand on her arm tightened its grip. "If there's anything I can do to help you find him..."
Toph pulled her arm away from him. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. "I'm not going to be able to find him," she said.
"Giving up? That's not the Toph I know."
"Kanto's out of the picture, okay?" Toph snapped. "Finish up your stupid collage. I'm going outside for some fresh air." She stood up and stalked out the door into her backyard.
Toph really liked her yard. Her parents had tried to hire a landscaper for her, but Toph had shut that idea down immediately. Her yard was rough around the edges, just like her. It was also rough around the middle, and rough for quite a distance downwards too. After all, this was where she came to practice her earthbending.
Which is why Toph's house was so small while the space around it was so big. It was a bit of an anomaly in the middle of a city, sure, but there were perks to being one of the city's founders.
Sokka had left a few hours ago. She'd stayed outside, stomping pillars into and out of existence while Sokka shuffled around her kitchen. It felt vaguely like he was cleaning up after her, but Toph had put extra effort into not paying too much attention to what he was doing. She just wanted to be alone.
Now that she was alone, she wasn't eathbending anymore. She stood quietly at the entrance to her house, feeling the destruction she had left behind. She took in the new configuration of crevices and boulders that made up her own personal brand of landscaping, just like she did after every session. Somehow, her newest construct seemed angry. Confused.
A squirrel frog leapt across her path, bounding into a hole she'd made and emitting a hollow croak. A flock of birds chirped amidst the rustling of leaves from a tree in her neighbour's yard, and she heard a dog bark from across the street. She could feel the dirt on her skin, and the dirt on her face. She could feel where her tears had cleaned it away, down her cheeks and all the way to her chin.
She could feel the baby move inside of her.
She'd wanted to be alone when Sokka was here, but now that she was alone she wished she wasn't. It was just her and this thing squirming inside of her. This thing that depended on her, and she was already failing it. She couldn't find Kanto. This child depended on her, and only her.
Alone.
She felt another contraction, but barely reacted this time. Her muscles tensed and her face hardened. Another round of tears ran down her face, joining their brothers in the wet dirt at her feet. That was the third one so far...
Motherhood wasn't right for her. Toph had known this since she was a teenager, since long before she'd reconnected with her parents and they'd started trying to set her up with an arranged marriage. She'd never wanted a husband and she'd never wanted a family.
She'd never wanted to disappoint a child like her parents had disappointed her.
Another contraction hit, closer than the last one. Toph still didn't move, though her breath caught in her throat. She could feel something sticky between her legs but, maybe... it was for the best.
She couldn't even find the child's father. Kanto would know how to be a parent. He'd wanted kids, a family... Toph could only screw things up, heck, she'd already got a pretty good start on that one.
The pressure in her abdomen was worse, and the baby had stopped moving. She could still feel her heartbeat though. She was still alive in there.
What if her baby was blind, like her? That wouldn't be so bad. Toph was thriving, after all. But what if the baby couldn't earthbend? What if her child was properly helpless? Toph didn't know how to handle the non-earthbending blind. The proper blind. She didn't want to have to raise a child who couldn't see with her eyes or her feet.
Then again, her parents hadn't wanted to raise a child who couldn't see...
The next contraction was bad enough that it forced Toph to hunch over with a pained cry. She grasped at her abdomen, gasping for breath as though she had just resurfaced from a body of water. The wetness between her legs was alarming, as was the pain.
She turned around, stumbling into her house. Making her way towards the telephone in her living room. It was difficult, but Toph could handle difficult.
She always had.
"Katara," she gasped into the receiver once her fingers had found the right numbers. "Katara, help me..."
Katara's alarmed voice on the other end of the phone was somehow comforting to Toph. The way she took charge, the rapid questions being thrown Toph's way... something told her she would be just fine.
Toph could handle this.