4.
The most surprising thing about Yakone getting the drop on all of them is really that he was the first person to pull it off since the war. Not that Toph has never been hurt in a fight, but the casual display of power he'd treated them to had been something else. It had shut her down, the extra senses she used to feel the shape of the world; when she released him from his cuffs she'd been completely blacked out, trying frantically to find where Sokka was, and Aang, and her officers.
"I fucked up," she says angrily, standing in Aang's office. Sokka hovers in the doorway, not sure if he should stay or go. "You know I did! I suspected he was special and I still had the stupid keys with me. Go on, shout at me!"
"No," Aang says, infuriatingly calm. "We all underestimated him. I refuse to blame on you. Rather, you did an excellent job with the evidence. Stand down, Toph. Go to the hospital and let them see if the bloodbending did any damage. No-one here is interested in punishing you."
"We're going to go stay with Suki," Toph says, "Uncle Twinkletoes says your mamma has to take a holiday. And Twinkletoes never gives up aboutanything, does he?"
Aang, she just knows, is smiling benevolently right now, being the annoyingly serene monk. "No, he doesn't," he says. "Republic City will still be here when you get home."
Toph hopes that Lin misses all the tension and undertones behind the exchange, but kids are so smart that she doesn't have that much hope. "We'll see about that," she says, laughs.
"You should have fun," Aang tells them - tells Toph. "Forget work for a while."
"I thought no-one was interesting in punishing me," Toph mutters.
"I'm not sure I understand your definition of punishment," Aang says, still completely unruffled.
Sokka follows them to the ferry – to wave them off, he says.
"But why aren't you coming too?" Lin asks.
Sokka drops down to a crouch, ruffles Lin's hair. She tolerates it from Sokka. Zuko tried once and she smacked his hand away. "I have to work," he says, pulls one of his best bo-ring faces. "But say hi to Suki for me," he orders. "And make sure your mamma doesn't fall off the boat."
"Yes!" Lin says, and runs off after Toph, waving as she goes.
Sokka watches until the ferry is almost out of sight, sliding away toward the southern horizon.
Kyoshi Island is apparently doing well, but Toph doesn't really know what to make of it. There's more people, more buildings; her feet can't really recognise it. The Kyoshi Warriors still live in the same cluster of buildings, but finding their way there would've been a bitch without Suki. Just as well she insisted.
"So," she says, "tourists, huh?"
"Yup," Suki says. "And pilgrims. I'm afraid you've hit peak season. Apparently we're living history."
"Aren't we all," Toph says. "Legends in our time. Pretty sweet, really."
"Hmm," Suki offers, clearly sceptical. "I don't know, not all of us invented metalbending. We're mostly just sort of quaint, I think. And I'll tell you about the fetishists some other time," she adds, darkly.
She leads them up down the corridor, not up the stairs to her own apartment. "I thought you guys would like to sleep on the ground floor," she offers.
This is basically why Suki is the best, Toph thinks. It's one thing with the high-rise public buildings in Republic City, which have skeletons of concrete and metal and stone, but high buildings made only of wood kind of annoy her. Or, OK, freak her out. Just a bit. It's like boats; the dead wood doesn't carry that good a connection to the ground, everything gets fuzzy. The higher, the worse. Not that she'd mind making a scene about it, but ok, it's kind of nice not to have to.
It takes Lin hours to fall asleep, surrounded by the quiet whispering of the old building, beams creaking and the breeze from the sea murmuring around the eves. Toph sits on the corner of the bed, and Suki sits cross-legged on the floor and tells her stories about the island until she almost thinks she knows it. And suddenly it's the next morning.
And then there's a beach to explore.
"Reproduction," Azula snaps, "sickens me. The system is ridiculous and the results... well."
She's staring out of the window, down towards the beach. Ty Lee crosses the room and looks around Azula's shoulder, tries to guess her line of sight.
On the beach is the unmistakable figure of Toph, barefoot and still boyish after all these years; she's running back and forth with a child, both of them screaching with laughter; throwing up sand at each other, building walls to trip each other and tearing them down again.
"-to the Unagi," she can hear Toph shouting, and the child tears away; but it's hard to say who's chasing who, they're running in such complicated loops.
It looks pretty fun, Ty Lee thinks.
"Ridiculous," Azula repeats.
Ty Lee ignores her, strategically. "I'm going down," she says brightly, and by the time she's made it to the door Azula has turned and is trailing after her, expression determinedly bored, as though it was all the same to her.
"Lin," Azula repeats. "And you're clearly a Beifong."
"Uh-huh," Lin says, narrows her eyes at Azula. "And you're Azula. Apparently you're meant to be really scary."
"Am I not?"
"Nope," Lin says. Of course not; she's a Beifong and she's nine years old. She probably doesn't have the sense to be scared of an active volcano. Azula would like to think she doesn't find this particular Beifong trait in the least bit charming, but she finds she does have something of an appreciation for it. Cowering is all well and good but she has to admit, it actually does get old eventually. The thought amuses her, in an idle sort of way. How times change.
Toph, she notices, is keeping track of them; keeping her distance, standing with her back against a tree at the edge of the forest, arms crossed firmly over her chest.
"If I'm not scary, why was I locked up for years?" Azula asks, ignoring her.
"If you're scary, why did they let you out?"
Toph laughs. "She's got you there."
Azula has aged, more than the rest of them. If she seemed how Toph remembered she'd probably pick a fight, but there's something off about her now. Toph really doesn't fucking want to know what the Fire Nation thinks a mental hospital is meant to do; probably something messed up. Azula seems like it's messed her up, anyway; she never used to be ill, as far as Toph could tell. Mostly she was just an arsehole. Now she keeps herself out of the way, turns up on the edge of things and leaves as soon as more than one person has noticed her. She doesn't feel very dangerous, either – that'd be another instant fight, especially with Lin here.
"You're a mother," Azula says. Accuses, really.
"Yup," Toph says.
"And she's your perfect little metalbender daughter. How very sweet."
And that's all; Azula turns on her heel and leaves.
Toph shrugs, rolls her eyes at Azula's retreating back.
Ty Lee, though, greets her as though they'd always been friends. Toph struggles out of an over-enthusiastic hug, and doesn't pay attention to more than a quarter of what Ty Lee actually says.
"Don't mind Azula, though," Ty Lee is saying when she tunes back in. "She's just... you know, it hasn't been that easy!"
Ty Lee still tends to exclaim, Toph notes. She wondered, back then, if the Kyoshi Warriors would calm her down. Apparently, the answer was no.
"You're still her keeper," Toph says.
"No way," Ty Lee says. "We're, um. Friends. And friends help friends. And I totally don't blame her for back then, it was a really difficult time..."
"The war," Toph says, breaks into the flow of words. "No shit." Ty Lee's use of the word 'friends' isn't really convincing Toph either. She wonders if Ty Lee is flustered about the idea of people knowing she and Azula have a relationship, or about the relationship itself. She wonders if their relationship is really obvious to everyone or if she's just being a freak again, too.
"Mm," Ty Lee says, vaguely.
"Look," Toph says, because there's one thing she really is curious about, that she never got the full story on. "How the fuck did you get Azula out?"
"Oh," Ty Lee says. "That was't me! I mean I totally put in a good word for her. But um. Mostly it was her mother."
"You don't need to tell everyone who asks," Azula says sourly from behind Ty Lee's shoulder.
Ty Lee jumps. "Azula!"
"Since we're sharing, though, yes, my mother saved me," Azula says. "There was a tearful reunion, it was very touching, you would have cried at the sight. If you could see."
She still can't read Azula all that well, but Ty Lee's reaction suggests that this might be an oversimplification of the truth. Since common sense would also suggest that, Toph runs with it as a theory. "Right," she says, "you were totally delighted to see the mother who you say never loved you. I bet it was great. Almost makes me wish I could have been there. Did anything explode?"
She wonders if Zuko would give her a straight answer, if she asked. Although she isn't sure why she should actually care.
Azula snorts. "Do you think they would have let me out if it had? I'm reformed. Just a regular horrible person, not a homicidal maniac at all."
And with that she drifts away again; the Kyoshi Warriors have started to gather in the hall for lunch. Ty Lee hesitates.
"Go on, get lost," Toph says, and Ty Lee bobs in gratitude, runs off after Azula.
"I think," Lin says, "she just seems kind of sad." She's been thinking carefully about something all afternoon, but Toph doesn't make the connection straight away.
"Who?"
"Azula. She's meant to be scary, I remember all the stories. Katara told me. She's really good at stories. But, I mean. She doesn't scare me, I think she's just sad. And she doesn't know how to be sad, so she's mean."
"You think?" Toph says. "Why's that?"
"What?"
"Why's she like that?"
Lin hums thoughtfully. "I guess no-one told her it's OK to be sad."
Kids, Toph thinks. Think they know it all.
"She's basically the local ghost," Suki says, shrugs. Toph feels the movment of Suki's shoulder against her arm. "She really keeps out of my way as much as she can, to be honest. I wonder if she isn't uncomfortable around people now, you know, she was shut up for a long time. She leaves the island sometimes with Ty Lee, but..."
"You guys really do collect Fire Nation strays down here, huh," Toph says.
"The ones who can't cope with the city," Suki agrees. "I don't know, I suppose it isn't really a problem. Neither of them have ever been any actual trouble, although Ty Lee can be... well, you know."
Cluelessly offensive, Toph presumes.
"You know," Suki says thoughtfully, "I don't think Azula's used her bending since she came here."
"I'm sure that's just out of the goodness of her heart," Toph says. Suki laughs.
"Oh, I don't know. Thinking about her too much gives me a headache. I suppose it's good that she isn't locked up and belted down or whatever terrible things they do. But she's hardly my favourite person."
"I don't know," Toph says. "If I was going to hate everyone who went off the deep end in the war..." she grins. "Actually I do, but that's only because I hate everyone. A newspaper said it, it must be true."
"Well, I thought a holiday was a stupid idea," Toph says. Suki is helping her pack, having gotten fed up with Toph's attempts to shove all her and Lin's clothes into a case in one gigantic ball. "But it turns out it's pretty OK. I got to hang out with you and be a bitchy gossip! Katara never puts up with that shit."
"I only put up with it because I love you," Suki says, all innocence.
"Oh, I know," Toph says. "And you only love me because I'm so cute and irresistible."
Suki throws a jacket at her head.
At home again, she makes up her mind to phone Zuko. This means shouting at a lot of fire nation officials and name-dropping like hell and finally agreeing with his personal secretary that yeah, OK, maybe he can call her back when he has a free moment, as long as he really does call. But she can't be bothered with letters. She'd have to get someone to write it, and someone to read her the answer, and it's boring and slow.
"Are you angry?" Lin asks her, sleepy, and Toph feels a little bit guilty for shouting so much, but only a little bit.
"No way," she says. "I'm having fun."
Zuko calls her half an hour later. "Hello, Toph," he says, fondly. "Have you been terrorizing half of my kingdom again?"
"Not more than they deserved," Toph says.
She can hear Zuko let out a little sigh. "I suppose you wanted to ask me something."
"Yeah," Toph says. "Don't worry, nothing blew up. Just wondering. I hung out with your sister for a week or two recently. And I thought, wow, Zuko never did tell us about his mother. And now I find out she's been running around taking people out of mental hospitals. Are you all cool now or what?"
She thinks, maybe, that Zuko is holding the receiver away from his head and staring suspiciously at it, as though it was to blame for the existence of her curiosity. The idea amuses her, anyway, and it's definitely a suspiciously long time before Zuko answers.
"I suppose," he says. "I wouldn't have expected it to be you who asked first, though."
"It's OK," Toph says. "We can talk about feelings. You're on the other end of a phone line. I can't punch you."
Zuko laughs. "I miss you all," he says. "You could punch me if you wanted, I don't think I'd mind."
"Eh," Toph says, "other people might have views about that though. You didn't answer the question."
"I don't think I know the answer," Zuko says. "Ursula... mother... seems sorry. She and Azula have spent time together fairly often since Azula was released, I think. But I don't know how things are. What I saw wasn't exactly... warm."
"To be honest," Toph says, "if I was Azula I probably would've tried to set your mother on fire. No disrespect, but man."
"Mm," Zuko says. "Actually, when I heard you'd spent time with Azula I was impressed neither of you had destroyed anything. Thank you for that, by the way, the diplomatic maneuvering would have been hell."
Toph falls asleep with Lin tucked against her side, wondering how families get so fucked up and if it's possible to fix them.
Her parents haven't tried to visit her in three years now. And she's been, well. Busy. But there's her and Lin and Suki and Sokka, and there's a chance there.
And Katara and Aang and their family would give her warm fuzzy feelings, if she went for that kind of thing. They've weathered Kya's teenage years pretty well, all things considered. She's still obliged to call them sickening in public, though.
But still.