Chapter Text
Parenting came with a lot of uncertainty, and because each child is different, it was a job that came with a lot of unexpected factors. But there was one thing Kanto knew he could rely on, and that was his children's insatiable need to put whatever they were able to get their hands on into their mouths.
It would be fantastic if the foods his kids ate were confined to lean meats and any veggie he’d put in front of them, but unfortunately, they’d consume bugs, thread, and old flying lemur food if put in front of them.
But Kanto learned the hard way that they could consume even more than that.
The day he came home with Toph’s finalized engagement ring, he made sure that no one but the kids and their sitter was home and that Toph was still at work. Once he could, he relieved the sitter and greeted his children with kisses on their foreheads as he always did. His and Toph’s youngest, Jian, was merely three years old and was stomping around the house, still getting a grip on how to walk around. Kanto smiled at the boy as he set the unboxed ring down on the table by the decorative cornucopia, then asked Lin how her day was. The six-year-old shrugged as she left the kitchen area, and said, “It was a day.”
Kanto laughed and nodded, approaching the sink to do the dishes. That, it certainly had been. He had to try his hardest to avoid Toph at work as soon as they stepped foot out of their home because he was about to spend a whole day lying to her about his whereabouts and he wasn’t planning on getting caught. He’d been short and natural in his replies to her and was absolutely sure she didn’t suspect a thing.
Picking up the ring proved to be an impossible task, though, because everyone seemed to need him for something: police reports, briefings, debriefings, training orders – just about everything they never needed him so urgently for before. He’d barely even had time to take his lunch break, either, so he had to wait to leave work to be able to collect the ring and race home before Toph. After the longest and busiest possible day at the station, the fifteen-minute walk over to his buddy’s place to collect the ring seemed fairly quick in comparison.
For months, he had been working with an artist on the perfect ring for Toph. Kanto had bent a beautiful ring out of the most precious metals he was able to get his hands on – a perk of being close, personal friends with the Avatar – then approached someone he knew through work in order to work on the design and any embellishments.
The ring he had taken home finally was thin, two different colored metals crisscrossed with a single stone in the center of it. It was simple and he was absolutely sure she would love it. He was also genuinely proud of the work he and his friend had done on it.
Drying his hands off a rag, he turned to the table and began to remove the plethora of toys that decorated its surface. Then, he cleaned the few crumbs off it with the rag he was holding, suddenly realizing that the ring he’d left on the table was nowhere in sight.
Kanto’s eyes practically bulged out of their sockets. He’d set the ring right here. Right next to the centerpiece. It couldn’t have grown legs and walked away, could it?
He got on all fours and looked beneath the table. Nothing, except for Lin’s socks, which he grabbed to toss into a laundry basket.
Panicking, he called Lin.
“Have you seen a, uh, ring anywhere by any chance?” He asked, scratching the back of his neck as he continued to frantically look for it around the table. “It was right here a few minutes ago. I put it right here.”
Lin shook her head. “No, daddy. But I did see Jian playing with something earlier. I didn’t know what it was, though.”
Kanto froze, then sprinted toward the toddler’s room, where he was happily clapping his hands as some upbeat music played out of the radio.
“Hi there, Fire Cracker,” Kanto said, taking a seat in front of the three-year-old. “How’s it hanging?”
“Ba-ba!”
He smiled at his son, and said, “Yeah, it’s Baba. How are you, bud?”
“I hunger,” Jian spoke with a yawn.
Kanto bit his bottom lip and pulled Jian onto his lap. “Hungry, huh? Did you happen to have a desire to eat a metal ring?”
The boy giggled, and Kanto felt like crying.
If Toph had taught him anything about metalbending, it was that if it was made out of metal, he’d be able to feel it no matter where it was. With that in mind, he decided that he would become a human metal detector. He asked Jian, “Baby boy, what did you swallow?”
“Cookie?” Jian asked as Kanto hovered his palm over his stomach, trying to find the ring. “Cookie, Baba?”
Sure enough, it took Kanto no time to find the ring somewhere in Jian’s digestive tract. He could feel it, but he didn’t want to move it out or help it along so as to not hurt him. So he pressed a kiss to his son’s head and said, “Let’s get you a cookie before you find momma’s meteorite bracelet and eat that too, yeah?”
Jian’s face perked up at the word “cookie,” and he began to clap his little hands. Kanto couldn’t be mad at him even if he tried, but there went his plans of proposing to Toph until Jian decided he wanted to shit the damn thing out.
At least, it would make for a funny story one day.
As he carried the boy to the kitchen, he heard Toph at the door, so he opened it up before she unlocked it, letting her in.
“My favorite boy!” Toph said with a huge smile as she took Jian – who was already reaching for his mother – from Kanto’s arms. “I missed you so, so much, baby boy.”
“Hey, hey, what about me?”
Toph rolled her eyes as she shut the door with a kick and pressed a kiss onto Jian’s head. “You’ve been avoiding me all day so you don’t deserve my kisses, Hotshot.”
“But-”
“I’m sorry. I don’t make the rules. Do I, Jian?”
The toddler giggled and nuzzled his head into his mom’s neck as Lin crashed into her legs. Toph was smiling at the attention she was getting and she turned her head toward where she knew Kanto was. “Where’s my kiss?”
“But you said-”
“Now or never.”
Quickly, Kanto pressed a long kiss to her lips, and before they could melt into it, he felt a soft slap on his cheek from a tiny, toddler hand, startling him away from his girlfriend.
Toph snorted and let out a loud string of laughs, Lin following, and eventually Jian and Kanto.
“Good to know how much you love your pops, Fire Cracker,” Kanto said, gently ruffling his son’s hair.
Toph was still laughing until her hand went to Jian’s tummy and she scowled. Her hand moved around a bit. “Why is… why is there a ring in my son’s stomach right now?”
“A-a ring? Yeah? That’s odd,” he said backing into the couch and lifting his feet off the ground. “He must have been rummaging through your things, right Lin?”
Lin was distracted by the gunk between her toes to answer right away, but when she realized she was being spoken to, she lifted her head and enthusiastically nodded, “Right, dad.”
“Huh,” Toph said, shifting Jian over to her other hip. “Well, you’re just forgetting that I don’t own any rings, Hotshot.”
“Oh. Uh, then how are you so sure it’s a ring, then?”
“It’s a circle made out of metal. It’s a ring,” she said with an eye roll. Then, she froze for a moment, turning to him. “Is...Is this an engagement ring?”
Kanto cleared his throat and started laughing nervously. “What? Why would- That’s got to be something else. Oh, uh, I just remembered that I forgot to get us, uh, dinner? Yeah, I should grab something real quick. I’ll be a few minutes.”
As he sprinted off the couch and grabbed his coat, he could feel Toph trying to hold back her laughs. He was about to open the door to leave but her voice stopped him.
“Hey, Hotshot?”
He turned to look at her, his heart going a mile a minute. “Yeah?”
“I’d have said yes,” she said, her nose in Jian’s neck. “If you’d asked. I’d have said yes.”
Kanto couldn’t help the smile that appeared on his face as he took two quick steps toward her and captured her lips with his. It took a little longer than earlier for Jian to smack him again to get them to part.
“Hey, you owe me, buddy, give me a break here.”
Jian giggled and gave his dad’s cheek another smack, making Toph topple over in laughter.
“I can’t wait to have a shit-filled ring on my finger.”