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“I’m so sorry–”
“Shut up,” the woman in the adjoining holding cell said, her eyes wide in fury. “Shut up or I will teach myself to bend wood right this instant and send you flying to next Sunday.”
Kanto shrunk into himself and sighed, quietly groaning at the painful throbbing in his nose. He’d been having such a nice night, but he just had to fuck it up, didn’t he? What an idiot he was. Really. No other person was as idiotic as he was.
The night had started off well enough. He and his buddies had decided that it was high time for a reckless night out after a full semester of acting responsibly and whatnot, so they went to the newish bar nearby and drank and ate and acted their age. It was well deserved, in his opinion.
And they were having a good time. They were. There were girls and flirting and all the things Kanto had deprived himself of during the academic year for the sake of his grades and his scholarship. But then, someone threw a punch, and someone else did some bending, and it all went to hell.
Literally.
Kanto had tried to not get involved, he really did, but someone randomly socked him on the cheekbone and he just had to defend himself, but his aim must have been slightly off because he punched an innocent, beautiful bystander who was exiting the bathroom. Unfortunately for him, it seemed like this gorgeous stranger was some kind of heavyweight champion because she knocked him flat out as his apology was leaving his lips.
And when he woke up, he was in a wooden holding cell. With the beautiful stranger in the neighboring cell.
How he hated bar brawls.
He looked around the cell for the first time since he’d woken up – not at all because he was too busy gawking at the woman; not at all – and realized that none of the people he’d gone out with were with him. All he saw were two overly drunk, sweaty, middle-aged men from whom he could see the stale stench of uncleanliness and alcohol radiate. He shivered at the sight of them and scooched further into his corner of the cell, both wondering about his friends and the other people in the brawl as well as about the woman in the cell just a few feet away from him.
After having looked at her for so long, he was sure that he could already describe her to a sketch artist to the tee. Her once perfectly twisted black braids were now disheveled, some strands of her hair hanging loosely around her face and he noticed her blowing her bangs away from her face in annoyance every few minutes; there was some blood on her green shirt, but it didn’t look like her own – it was probably his , actually; she had the beginnings of a bruise forming on her cheekbone. And her eyes. He knew right away that she was blind because of the dense cataract atop her irises, but he could just get lost in them all the same.
She was also short. And he loved it.
This was just about all he knew about the stranger. That and the fact that she could hold her own in a random bar brawl that she had no part in. And that she was apparently a bender if he took her earlier threat of “bending him into next Sunday” seriously.
She also looked painfully familiar to him, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.
He had a strong urge to talk to her, but he knew that she would probably shoot him down again, yet, despite knowing this, he blurted, “I’m really sorry.”
She rolled her eyes, blowing away her bangs for the umpteenth time in the past few minutes – not that he was keeping count. “So you’ve mentioned.”
That wasn’t a threat , he thought. Progress!
“I really didn’t mean to–”
“I know,” she said, her lips twitching. “Or at least, I’d hope you didn’t because you punch like a kindergartener.”
Kanto raised a brow in amusement. “And here I was thinking that I was on my way to a career in boxing.”
“Good luck with that, Hotshot,” she said with a soft laugh, leaning her head against the wall behind her.
“Hotshot?”
She shrugged. “Seems fitting.”
He smiled, pressing the heel of his palm onto the side of his nose and quietly hissing at the pain. Her head turned slightly in his direction in curiosity, but before she could say anything if she was, he asked, “So… what’s your name?”
She snorted. “That the best you could do?”
Kanto’s cheeks heated up slightly. “What do you mean?”
“You’re clearly trying to flirt with the girl you assaulted at a bar,” she said smugly, making his already red face even redder. “And your first move is to ask for my name? You can certainly do better than that, can’t you?”
“Well,” he started carefully, knowing that she was probably right. About the flirting and the doing better bit. “You can… you can learn a lot about a person just from their name.”
“Oh?”
“Mhm.”
“Okay, like what?”
He hadn’t expected that question.
“Uh, like, uh, what their… personality is like,” Kanto said. “Names are… the window to the soul, you know.”
What?
“Are they?” the woman asked, a mockingly inquisitive look on her face. “I always thought that eyes were the window to one’s soul, but they’re useless to me, so I wouldn’t be the correct person to confirm that for you.”
Kanto deadpanned, then huffed throwing his head onto the wooden gate that separated them. “Can’t a guy know your name for the simple hell of it?”
As if on cue, a guard walked up with a tall, tanned woman and looked about his cellmate’s age. “Toph Beifong? It’s your lucky day.”
Kanto’s eyes widened and he ignored the pain that spread up and down the bridge of his nose. Toph Beifong! How did he not recognize her immediately? The chick was probably one of the most renowned earthbenders in the country, and likely the world . He knew that she lived on campus and that she regularly hung out at the sports bars near the university, but he’d never run into her before, despite his many attempts to track her down and meet her at the very least.
“Got your wish,” Toph said, a coy smile on her face as she got up and left the cell unstably due to the lack of earth beneath her feet.
It took him a second to recover from his initial shock, but he stood and walked up to the front of the cell, watching how Toph’s friend scolded her for getting into a brawl and how she should have known better than to get into a tussle. He smiled a bit when he saw Toph roll her eyes and told her to shut up and do her a favor. The friend, Katara as Kanto heard Toph call her, glared at her and leaned toward Toph as the latter whispered something into her ear. A bit of shuffling and a few moments later, Toph walked up to Kanto with a slip of paper between her index and middle fingers.
“Keep in touch, Hotshot,” she said, a teasing tone to her voice as he took the slip of paper from her fingers. “I expect you to actually know how to flirt next time we talk.”
With that, she left, Katara trailing behind her with a meek and knowing smile on her face, leaving Kanto just about ready to swoon. He unfolded the piece of paper to reveal her phone number scribbled neatly on a parking ticket with blue ink.
He suddenly loved random bar brawls.