Chapter Text
Toph Beifong, renowned earthbender and a true force of nature, found herself facing an unfamiliar challenge that even her bending prowess couldn’t conquer: motherhood. Alone and unsure, she held her newborn daughter, Lin Beifong, in her arms, feeling a mixture of awe, love, and a shit ton of unfamiliar and overwhelming anxiety.
The sound of Lin's cries echoed through their home, and Toph’s heart raced. She had faced down armies, toppled buildings, and held the weight of an entire town on her shoulders, but the tiny, delicate life in her arms was a puzzle she didn't know how to solve. Toph's brows furrowed as she clenched her fists, exasperation with the situation building within her.
“Alright, kid,” Toph said, her voice carrying a hint of uncertainty as she tried to keep it steady. “You and I are going to figure this out. Right?”
Her daughter’s only response was more sobs and the clenching of her own little fists, and it both scared and frustrated Toph. All she wanted to do was bring her baobei relief, but nothing she did made that so. For weeks, Lin would just not stop crying. Hours and hours on end, Toph would try to find ways to keep her calm, try to soothe her, but nothing would bring her baby girl any relief. There were times when she seemed fine, but then, she just started her crying again. Toph couldn’t help but think that she was doing something wrong.
Still, she didn’t want to assume that she was, so she was trying to do things herself. She wasn’t always going to have a healer on hand, or even Katara to call whenever she wanted to know what was going on after she’d ruled out the obvious.
Over Lin’s screaming, Toph hushed her and told her that everything would be alright with a tightness in her throat she was finding harder to refuse to acknowledge. She wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince her daughter or herself.
For what was probably the fifth hour going at this, Toph stood in the otherwise quiet nursery, cradling her daughter in her arms as she always did when she wailed. The wind coming in from the small opening in the window made the room’s temperature pleasant enough for Toph not to completely unravel.
Lin's cries reverberated through the room, a relentless chorus that tugged at Toph's heartstrings.
“Come on, Linny,” Toph muttered, her brow furrowing in frustration. She shifted Lin’s position, rocked her gently, and tried various soothing techniques Kanto had helped her learn before he took off for an overseas mission some time ago. Yet, nothing seemed to quiet the storm of cries that filled the room.
Nothing ever did.
Night after night, Toph faced this very challenge. The world had witnessed her earthbending feats, but there she stood, grappling with the unfamiliar and relentless cries of her own flesh and blood. Doubts began to seep into her mind, whispering that perhaps she wasn't cut out for this, that she was failing as a mother.
Spirits, what was she doing wrong? What kind of mother couldn’t soothe her baby, or quiet them down when they’d been weeping for hours, days, weeks, even?
It wasn’t until she felt the tears she’d been holding back roll down her face that she heard the tone of an incoming call coming from the radio in the sitting room. What now? Toph thought, her fatigue and annoyance from being awake almost every night and not even being able to nap because of Lin’s constant crying.
The ringing was insistent, and her mind could not put two and two together to figure out who it could possibly have been calling her at whatever hour of the night it was. So she let it continue to ring until she could no longer deal with both it and the sobbing.
Stomping into the sitting room and toward the large radio in the corner of the space, Toph shifted Lin to one side to free up her arm in order to grab the receiver, press one button or another, and bring it up to her mouth.
“What?” she practically roared into the mic over the sound of Lin’s crying.
There was a muffled chuckle on the other line and only a fraction of the tension she was feeling melted off her shoulders at the sound of it. “Woah, Beifong. Bad time?”
“Kanto,” she breathed. “I thought you wouldn’t be able to get a hold of a radio until Sunday.”
“Baby, it is Sunday.”
Toph furrowed her brows and shook her head. It couldn’t have been, could it? Her days couldn’t have melded together because of how utterly exhausted she’d been due to lack of proper sleep, could they have?
She swallowed against the lump in her throat, as she continued to gently bounce Lin. “Right, yeah. Sorry.”
Kanto hummed. “Toph, I think you should try reaching out to Katara—”
“And what? Tell her that I’m an unfit mother who can’t care for her kid properly? Fuck no. I can figure this out. I—I’m probably not doing something or I’m doing something wrong or—”
“Or maybe there’s something going on,” he interrupted, then inhaled at the same time Lin’s crying suddenly began to settle. Toph let out a long and slow breath before collapsing onto the loveseat behind her, allowing Lin to settle in her arms and relax her tiny body against Toph’s chest as Kanto continued, “I heard—there’s this guy I’ve gotten close to while on this mission—”
“Is this your way of telling me you’re leaving me?”
He snorted. “Hilarious, but seriously. There’s this guy who’s also a new father and we were talking about our kids and we came onto the topic of fussiness. He found out that his son has this thing called colic. He said that his son’s little fists would clench up and his muscles would tighten, the crying and the wailing would happen predictably, his little back would arch when he was in his crib, and nothing they could do could help comfort him. It was resolved by his son’s third month. The symptoms reminded me of Lin, so I really—I think you should finally bring this up to Katara. Maybe Lin’s got it, too.”
Not once had Toph stopped to consider that something might have actually been wrong with Lin. That there might have been an explanation for everything other than her being a lousy parent. Thinking on it, if this were some kind of condition like the one Kanto mentioned, it would explain so much. It would prove to her that she was, indeed, doing her best and that she had nothing to do with how utterly miserable her nearly two-month-old was.
The relief she felt at the mere possibility that this was something that, from the sounds of it, was fixable brought tears to her eyes again. She held them back, though, and finished her conversation with Kanto some moments later, plonking out right there on the loveseat with her daughter finally asleep on her chest.
Armed with her newfound insight, Toph woke to the sound of Lin’s cries once more, hours later. She felt a little better rested. Perhaps it was because she had an actual reason to bother her best friend for medical advice. And as luck would have it, Katara was in town to check in on her Republic City clinic.
It would not have done Lin nor Toph any well if they had to travel over to the Fire Nation and pop in on Katara there.
Toph could sense how Katara went from happy to see her and Lin to concerned. Toph wasn’t sure if it was all that evident on her face how much all of this had weighed on her until that moment.
“I don’t even want to ask how it’s going, so I’ll just ask what’s going on,” Katara said after pulling her into the clinic and to an examination room.
Right when Toph was about to reply, Lin arched her back in her arms and wailed out again. Toph shut her eyes in agony. “Where do I start?”
Toph recounted her observations and her struggles, her voice a mixture of frustration and hope. Her best friend listened attentively and then gently explained that Kanto—“for once”—was right. Lin might’ve been suffering from colic, a condition that was not uncommon in infants.
“It’s nothing that won’t be resolved,” Katara reassured, laying Lin down on her back on the examination bed. Through the metal, Toph could feel how Katara was cycling Lin’s legs, instantly bringing the baby girl relief from her crying. “It’s nothing that you caused. It just happens, and it’ll pass eventually.”
With a mixture of relief and renewed determination after the clinic visit and reassurance from her best friend, Toph returned home. Armed with the knowledge of what was afflicting her daughter, she performed the specific techniques Katara recommended to ease the colic’s symptoms. She adjusted Lin's feeding schedule, experimented with different holding positions, and used soothing techniques that targeted her daughter’s discomfort.
Slowly but surely, Toph began to notice a change. The cries that once seemed unrelenting started to wane. Lin’s moments of calm and contentment grew longer, and Toph’s confidence as a mother blossomed alongside her daughter’s progress.
In the quiet of the night, as Toph held, for the first time in weeks, a peacefully sleeping Lin in her arms, she whispered, “I’m so glad I haven’t fucked you up, kid.”
As if replying to her, Lin cooed in her sleep, snuggling closer to her mother, the softest snores filling the silence in the room.