When the coalbirds began to squawk at the rising sun, Toph asked one of the Kyoshi Warriors to show her the way to Iroh's quarters.
"I hope I didn't wake you." She was left alone with him, and he led the way to his sitting room, low pillows scattered around a large round table. It felt like a firepit; Toph idly wondered if there was a chimney in the ceiling for the smoke to escape. It would be as easy as a subtle tap, tap of her fingernails against a wall to use her seismic sense and find out, but she couldn't be assed.
"Not at all." Iroh lowered himself to the cushions, bones creaking. "When you get to a certain age, you do not need very much sleep anymore."
Toph sat opposite him, respectfully. Unlike most of the people she'd known, the old man actually deserved her respect, now more than ever. "I want to apologize for what you saw last night."
"Don't worry about that. It was good to see him doing something a man his age should be doing. He has not left the city since he returned from visiting his mother," Iroh said heavily. "That was over five years ago. Until you came to stay, he didn't show emotion anymore, not even anger. I worried for him every day."
Before she could bring herself to speak again, she could feel heat from the center of the table, and knew he was shoring up the fire with his bending. Knowing Iroh, there was probably a teapot involved, too.
"I know that Zuko has to attend to his responsibilities before his personal feelings," Toph went on, slowly. "I won't pretend anything else is the truth. But if he doesn't relax a little, he's going to snap. He's doing everything with practically no help."
There was tea involved, of fucking course. She heard a clank as he hung a kettle above the fire. "He has been doing a good job," Iroh said. "But my nephew is a stubborn man, and I am in no condition to give him very much help anymore. He needs to find new people he can trust."
"I'm still working on that," Toph said wryly. "In fact, I wanted to ask your opinion on a few people. And a few touchy situations cropping up in Yu Dao."
They had tea as they discussed the court, and it was delicious, as it always was. Toph left as soon as she'd finished her cup. There were things to do.
—-
"Today we're going to talk about what can and cannot be ignited!" Toph's voice was loud enough to carry across the training yard and echo off the outer palace walls. A staggered row of trainees stood before her; nine of her own lily-livered students, wildly disparate in age and disposition, and nine men and women of the Firelord's army, standing at ease. In the corner was the Firelord's steward, his brow already furrowed. Toph had already forgotten the man's name. "What burns? Wood. Plants. Hair. Things that can be waterbent." She flicked her fingers dismissively. "We don't care. We bend metal and stone. We don't have to worry about ignition. Right?"
Her students were still for a long moment, trying to think of exceptions. They knew she loved trick questions. Sul was the one who finally said, sofly, "yes?"
"NO!" she bellowed.
Her students were startled, but not surprised. (Her best students wouldn't have been startled, she reflected, but she'd left them in charge of the school in her absence in exchange for half the incoming tuition.) The Fire Army soldiers were too well trained to react at all.
"If our metal and rock was pure and clean, of course we wouldn't have to worry about it. But it isn't." She raised one hand, ripping a corner of the decorative stone roof from the palace building.
"Lady Beifong!" The steward cried. "I beseech you!"
"Cool it, hotman," Toph said, bringing the rock down to hover in front of her. "I know what I'm doing. Here," she said, pointing at the top surface of the rock. "Moss and shit growing all over, right? None of the stone in the training yard is gonna have this, they get scorched too often, but out in the wild? In the earth kingdom? This is everywhere. So say you've got a rogue firebender. You pull up your stone to block him. And, bam! Now your hair's on fire. How'd that happen? It happened because you're not thinking about your surroundings. You're not thinking about all the possibilities. Remember: always stay?" she prompted them.
"At least two moves ahead," her students recited.
"Right. So, hotmen," she addressed the Fire soldiers, because she loved hundred-year-old slang. It gave her a default nickname for an entire nation of people at once. "Queue up. You're gonna take turns lighting up my students. Don't hold back. If you burn them they'll remember the lesson."
She could say one thing for Fire Nation soldiers: they knew how to obey an order. They didn't hold back. As she supervised, her feet square on the ground and her arms locked behind her, they tore through her students one by one. Still, to her surprise, none of the novice metalbenders was burned. She counted out multiples of nine, a full rotation of sparring partners; after thirty six matches, everyone was sluggish.
"Alright, yellowbellies," she shouted. "Break for dinner. I hope you enjoy it, because it might be your last. Tomorrow you're training under the Fire Nation banner, and General Shuurai has been instructed not to give a damn about you. Dismissed!"
The nervous steward showed them out, metalbenders and firebenders alike. They were shuffling. Toph hated it when they shuffled. It was such a lazy habit, and it sent careless, fuzzy shocks through the ground that grated on her nerves.
She found her own way out of the military wing and back to her room, though there were surely servants hovering nearby that had been told to stay out of her way. As a hero of the Hundred Year War and a personal friend of the Firelord, she'd been granted impressive lodgings. The servant that had showed them to her had assured her that they were beautiful, but that didn't mean very much to her. Mostly they were large, and half floored in wooden panels, so there were enormous holes in her vision. She could guess what they contained by context; one enormous patch was probably the bed, a smaller one the wardrobe and washbasin, another the writing desk on a raised dias. The bathroom was stone, fortunately, with a big tub hewn out of the rock. Toph was able to relax a little, bending herself an outcropping to sit on, and get good and clean before shaking out her clothes and putting them back on. To her frustration she hadn't gotten much taller over time, but she'd filled out into a womanly figure, which meant she had to replace her clothes bit by bit. In the end, she didn't hate the results. Her travel clothes fit decently, probably looked the same as they used to, and her meteorite cuff was a reliable source of bending material in case of emergency. She had to work with metal epaulets some day, though. Everyone said they would look imposing, and she liked the idea of that.
It was easy enough to bend a comfortable sleeping place for herself once she was dressed, letting her hair dry over the edge of the outcropping while she picked her ears. It wasn't long before she fell into a restful sleep.
—-
A courier knocked on the door in the middle of a pleasant dream.
"What the everloving shit do you want?"
The courier bowed so swiftly and deeply that Toph could feel a little whoosh as her head swept by. "Honored Lady Beifong, I have been sent to give you a message."
"Fine, tell me what it is."
"Honored Lady, it is written here-"
"I'm blind," Toph interrupted.
"Oh, I am so sorry, Honored Lady." The woman bowed again, and the gust of air made Toph sneeze this time. "It is directly from the Firelord. He wishes to see you now."
Huh. That was sort of how her dream had started, too. The memory made her gruffer than she intended. "Fine, whatever."
The courier bowed again. "Please follow me, Lady Beifong." Like the soldiers, the courier kept her cool against Toph's personality. She was impressed enough not to harangue the woman further on the way to the family quarters of the palace. Most of the rooms felt empty, or had a raised floor of wood or carpet that prevented her from fully 'seeing' what was inside. The room the courier brought her to was large, with a raised stone pedestal in the center that bore a table and something else. A fire was part of the arrangement. Did every room in the palace have a vent for smoke? she wondered.
To her surprise, the courier didn't follow her in, but closed the door behind her. Zuko was the only one in the room.
"What's this?" Toph asked, climbing atop the low pedestal and taking a seat beside him at the table.
"I decided to make you dinner myself." He actually sounded nervous, which amused Toph; he was the one who had actually dated before. She'd been too busy inventing an entirely new subset of bending, teaching hundreds of people to utilize it, and telling her occasional suitors to fuck right off because she was doing things.
"That's really nice," she said cautiously. "Smells like fish?"
"Gull-salmon." She could hear the hesitant smile in his voice, and he reached a hand out towards her. "Come over here and t-"
His next words were drowned out by...something. Something deeper and louder than anything she'd ever heard before, that drowned out Zuko's heartbeat and his voice and everything around Toph and left her alone. Blind.
It faded as quickly as it had come.
"-happened? Are you alright?" Zuko's voice returned, concerned, and she felt his hands gripping her shoulders tight. "You look like you're going to fall over."
"Something's happening." From some strange, detached portion of her mind that was still reeling in shock, she noted that she sounded panicked. She'd never heard herself panic before.
It began again, building up more slowly, but this time it was louder. Toph threw herself in the direction of the wall and felt her way to the door. She could feel Zuko's hands grasping at her, trying to hold her back, but she needed to get outside. She ran down the hallway by memory, scraping her shoulder against a decorative carving on the wall, and the something was becoming physical. It was rumbling.
By the time she burst out of the front gates of the palace, the ground was shaking. She fell to her hands and knees, embraced the deafening pain, and listened.