Another twelve hour day behind her, Toph ambled her way through the city streets back to her home, eager for some rest and relaxation. It was only another ten seconds before she remembered that she had a kid. Rest and relaxation had become completely foreign concepts to her the day Lin entered the world. There was no such thing as a good nights' sleep or a quiet evening at home. There was only chaos and Lin. It shocked her that such a tiny human being could cause so much destruction before it was even able to stand. Baby Beifong had gone mobile at seven months old and Toph's world had been turned upside down by this little being's ability to crawl. Lin would lift herself up from her stomach, push against the ground with her dimpled knees and sashay a few feet forward before pausing to rock back and forth in this position. At this point she would move forward again and, without fail, discover some choking hazard and promptly insert it into her mouth. These adventures always ended in a fit of screaming as Toph pried her mouth open and dug around desperately for spirits knows what.

"Babies are stupid," Toph commented once after pulling a yuan coin from her daughters' throat. Katara choked on a laugh at her words.

"Seriously, who looks at a coin and thinks, 'hmmm this windpipe sized object is perfectly safe to suck on'? Babies- that's who."

Katara pat Toph's arm as she watched Mo bouncing Lin on one knee in an attempt to calm her after she'd been so rudely excavated by her mother.

"It could always be worse, Toph," Katara reminded her, "you could be doing it alone." Toph had simply shrugged. Some days she thought it would be easier without Mo around. Today was one of those days. As her exhausted body entered the front door of their home, she became immediately aware of the objects littering the floor. Scanning the place via vibrations she made a mental note of throat sized objects in Lin's reach. There were six. A mixture of her seismic sense and heightened hearing told her that her daughter was crawling toward her. She could hear the strumming of a guitar coming from down the hallway as well. Leaning down, Toph stretched out her arms and smiled widely, "There's my baby!" she cooed as she felt Lin closing in. Finding her shoulders at last, Toph scooped her up by the armpits and planted a big wet kiss on her cherubic cheek.

"What did you get up to today, kiddo?" she asked in a silly voice, earning her a tug on her hair as a reply. "Ouch! Let go you little punk!" Toph laughed extracting her bangs from Lin's clenched fist. She placed one hand at her bottom and immediately pulled it up.

"You're wet," Toph sighed, armor creaking as her body slouched with disappointment. She walked forward down the hallway to greet Mo, who sat on the floor strumming various chords on a guitar.

"What're you doing?"

"Working on some music," he replied without looking up.

"She's wet," Toph told him factually.

"Oh."

"Why don't you write a song about that," Toph spat, shifting Lin in her arms, "Call it 'I'm a Lazy Ass Who Never Changes Diapers'"

"I checked her like ten minutes ago," he argued without enthusiasm.

"Whatever," was all Toph could come up with before she turned on her heel and headed into the nursery where she proceeded to hold Lin's squirming form down long enough to unpin and re-pin a diaper. The music had stopped at some point during her changing and when Toph emerged from the nursery she heard Mo moving around in the kitchen.

"I really did just check her," he reiterated. Toph was too exhausted to counter him so she opted instead to ask him the question that had really been burning her mind.

"Are you cooking?"

"Yeah."

"Good. I'm so hungry that if I weren't so attached to this kid, I'd eat her up right now," Toph joked, coming in quick to Lin's neck blowing raspberries and making gobbling noises. Lin responded with peals of laughter. With a contented breath, Toph placed her daughter on the floor and began scouring for items of a hazardous nature. She gathered them all and set them on a table out of reach. Lin motored along the room with no particular agenda.

"Hey. You got an eye on her? I wanna put my feet up," Toph called into the kitchen, which was open to the living room.

"Yeah, I will watch her," Mo agreed and she heard the woosh of the stove being lit.

Toph gave her daughter's backside one good pat before heading to her room and removing her armor. She slipped a tunic over her bindings and re-entered the living room, tossing herself back onto the couch with a thud. Reaching behind her head she fumbled around for the radio dial and turned on the local news program. The announcer was of the opinion that the disgruntled colonials from the Fire Nation were setting up a power structure of their own quicker than the police could assemble themselves.

"Some of us are working inside the law, dunderhead," Toph argued at the box. It infuriated her to hear this criticism almost as much as it did to hear stories of the old authority still loyal to Ozai, scratching out codes of triangles and sketches of Guan Yu on the doors of their terrified non-bending neighbors. The bracelet on her upper arm vibrated slightly. She reached up for it and slid it off, bending the metal into shapes that suited her mood. This action always seemed to calm her when she was annoyed. She jokingly called it her "metal health exercises," but knew that a big reason she was calmed by this little bit of space jewelry was because of the person who gave it to her. She had been seeing more and more of Sokka lately and all the old feelings were bubbling around in her gut when he would make some kind of in-joke or lightly punch her shoulder. They were working together on organizing the city- Aang was there of course, but he didn't have the same effect. Nobody had ever excited her the way Sokka did. Maybe they were bound by trauma. As a group, they had concluded they would never make bonds like the ones they formed in wartime. During this conversation, Sokka had squeezed her hand. Of course, his other hand was holding Suki's, but that was beside the point. She wasn't really one of them. The core four, Toph had taken to saying. The core four and Zuko. And Suki- and whatever. Toph liked Suki, she really did. Suki was tough, loyal and very funny. They were friendly, but never friends and both understood there was a good reason for that. She sighed, dropping her head back and feeling a hint of guilt nip at her thoughts as she savored the smell of sizzling meat wafting from her kitchen. Mo was the guy she was supposed to be interested in. She was trying. They both were.

"Toph..." Mo said in a quiet voice shaking her from her thoughts, "Toph, look."

She sighed, twirling her bracelet on one finger, "Do I really need to go over the blind thing with you again?"

"No, I mean, look," he whispered again. Catching his meaning, Toph let one foot drop off the edge of the couch and sent a small vibration across the floor. She sensed all the objects there. The house was a mess, there were toys scattered all over the place, a guitar, and of course her baby girl crawling across it all. And then Toph saw it, the thing Mo had asked her to look at. Her heart skipped a beat. Just below Lin's stomach was a dent in the flooring- in the shape of one tiny little hand.

"She's an earthbender," Toph concluded, suddenly finding herself full of energy. She shot off the couch and shouted at the top of her lungs, "Woo hoo! My baby is an earthbender!"

"I knew she would be," Mo affirmed, moving toward them was a delighted shriek from somewhere below them and Toph leaned down to scoop Lin into her arms.

"Of course you are an earthbender," she cooed happily rubbing her nose against her daughters'. Mo leaned in and kissed Lin's cheek.

Without further fanfare, Toph lowered herself onto the floor lying flat on her stomach, after positioning Lin alongside. She sent a small wave through the floor, Lin giggled at the sensation and sat up, clapping.

"No, no kiddo," Toph sighed, flattening her daughter against the ground again. "Bend it for Momma." She sent another little pulse in the direction of Lin. The toddler had no reaction beyond babbling, "Dada."

"Ok first of all, MA-MA," Toph annunciated as she pressed her own hand against the ground creating a print, "and secondly- do this." Lin placed her small hand in the indentation of her mothers and pat it fondly. Toph sighed, dejected.

"She's not going to do it again," Mo told her from somewhere above.

Toph huffed at him, "She damn well will."

"Just come eat," he whined at her.

"How can you not be excited about this?" Toph snapped at him, over her shoulder. She couldn't fathom his nonchalance. Perhaps it was because bending was such an integral part of her identity. Nobody saw the world as Toph did, except maybe this little girl beside her. Her daughter, her only real family.

"I'm excited, its just not much of a surprise. We are both earthbenders after all," he finished shrugging. Toph had tuned him out already and resumed making divots in the stone floor. They would appear and disappear just as Lin slammed her palm against them, popping up at random as she squealed with delight.

"Ok you try," Toph finally said, pausing. Lin slammed a palm against the ground, creating another dent on impact.

Toph clapped manically, "Good girl!" She ran a finger across the dent sentimentally and felt a stinging in her eye. Toph made another dent, Lin mimicked her by creating another.

Toph pointed between the two concave circles in the floor.

"Same, same," she grinned.

She pointed at her chest, just above her heart, then tapped Lin's little nose.

"Same, same," she repeated with a smile that reached her tearful eyes.