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After swearing to Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko that she was fine and that they needed to quit babying her, she locked the door to her apartment and threw herself onto the ground of her bedroom with her back against her bed frame. She reached under her pillow for a familiar shirt that was wasted from years of overuse pressed against her nose, Toph felt numb.
She was not allowing herself to feel anything. Not her thoughts, not her emotions. Nothing.
But she did feel something latching onto her, and she couldn’t pinpoint what it was exactly because, for all she knew, it could be a number of things. Perhaps it was sadness at the situation, perhaps it was resentment.
Was it anger? It could be anger.
Was it anger at him or at herself, though?
Well, she couldn’t be mad at him, could she? That wasn’t fair. He didn’t ask to be killed, did he?
Toph let the tears she had been holding back as she inhaled the scent of the shirt slip down her cheeks and into the fabric she held. She was angry at herself for being such a fool. For letting herself fall in love and for ruining it for herself and for losing the person that made her better, that made her someone she enjoyed being.
From what Katara had told her, the funeral was beautiful. There was not a dry tear in the house, except for hers because she just did not want anyone to see how absolutely broken she was in reality. They’d even asked her to speak, but not because the two of them had been together before, but because she was the chief of the police department. She declined.
She loved him too much to only speak of him on behalf of her position. And it was the only thing she could have done because she wasn’t going to be able to talk otherwise. So she didn’t.
With a shaky sigh and a deep inhale, she shut her eyes and let her mind drift.
Things were going well for her and Kanto when she’d told him to beat it. They were happy and they were in love and she wouldn’t deny it, which was something that was incredibly out of character for someone like her who consistently repudiated a need for affection. And she just had to fuck it up, hadn’t she?
“I can’t do this anymore,” she’d told him on an ugly and muggy day. The two of them, she remembered, were sitting on the couch after a long day of work and his fingers were working through the knots in her loose hair. “It’s too much and I can’t do it.”
“Do what?” Kanto had asked her, the movement in his fingers ceasing in place. He pulled his hand away from her and she felt him shift where he sat to get a better look at her.
She huffed, hating that she had to explain herself further, hating that he was making this harder than what she thought it would be. “You and me. I-I can’t do it anymore, okay?”
And like the man he was, he understood. He questioned her about it, of course he did, but he wasn’t pushy and he didn’t force her to listen to him, he just told her that he’d always love her and that he’d be there if ever she changed her mind.
Her heart swelled as he pressed a final kiss to her lips – it was lingering, but it wasn’t indecent. It was as if he’d do it again someday, so she held onto that. Maybe she’d be ready next time he did it. Maybe she’d be ready to let him love her when he did it again. Then, she felt him leave, and she was empty. No one would ever know that she was, though, because she was a rock; she would not let herself fall.
She didn’t deserve him. She knew it. And this was the main reason why she had to end it.
But just a few days ago, only a month after she’d broken it off with him, she had been at work, sorting through the bottomless pit of police reports she had been avoiding, one of her newest recruits’ increasingly quickly-paced heartbeat knocked on her door. She’d thought nothing of it, then, because he was always nervous. Poor kid.
“Chief Beifong–”
After hearing the extreme fear in his voice, she’d stood from her desk, and in a monotone asked, “Who died?”
“It was, uh, it was Deputy Chief–”
“Get out.”
“But Chief–”
“I said leave,” Toph rasped, feeling breathless and nauseous all of a sudden. Her hands were balled into fists and as soon as she felt her officer leave, she let her knees buckle, allowing her to fall to the ground. Her nausea hit a pinnacle and she felt a burn journey up her throat, so she reached for her wastebasket and emptied the contents of her stomach into it. Her tears, a combination of what her sick caused and the emotions of the news, would not stop falling even after she’d finished and set her wastebasket aside.
She wanted to know the details, she wanted someone to walk her through everything that happened in order for her to find someone to blame. But she also wanted to remain unknowing, the way she was then, not wanting to know how he died and how she had elected to not be on the field that day in order to get ahead on her reports and how she couldn’t stop him from getting killed.
But she had to find out. She had to find out because of her position as the chief. And she had to find out because she loved him more than anything in the world, she was sure.
They’d told her that he was rescuing some hostages and that he and one of the victims had been caught in a premeditated explosion, both of them dying instantly. Before she could ask the officers in charge of the case if the captors had been killed or apprehended, they’d confirmed that the people responsible had been thrown into a cell to rot, a fact that brought her some kind of peace.
She’d made sure that they were far, far away from Republic City, though. As much as she wanted to commit a murder or two, she wasn’t about to. And she really wanted to, but Katara talked her down a few hundred pegs on the night she found out she was three months pregnant. As if matters couldn’t have gotten worse for Toph, she now had to worry about raising a child that she would have wanted to raise with him.
Her hands found solace on her stomach very often from that point on, though.
Katara also told her that Kanto dying wasn’t the end of the world, and Toph went feral, telling her that she didn’t know anything about the loss of someone she’d kicked to the curb. And Katara remained calm, but forcefully grabbed her by the wrists, despite Toph’s writhing, and said, “But I know loss, and I know what it can do to you, so you need to remember that it’s not the end of the world. And he loved you so much that he wouldn’t want you to think that it is. You need to let yourself feel, Toph.”
Toph, not knowing what else to say, was quiet for a moment, then mumbled, “What do you know.”
But as she sat against her bed frame, in the room she and Kanto once shared, her eyes shooting open, she negated what Katara told her, or she badly wanted to for the time being.
And at the same time, she realized that she could finally pinpoint what she was feeling. She felt regret . She regretted letting him go. She regretted not letting him see how much she loved him. She regretted not letting him love her the way he wanted to – and the way she wanted him to. She regretted not being able to tell him that much while he was alive. She regretted that she would be having his baby without him around. She regretted having to raise his baby without him. She regretted that he wasn’t with her. She regretted not being with him when he died.
And she would never be able to forgive herself for it.