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There was a heartbeat, she was sure of it.
Toph knew that there was a huge difference between her own heartbeat, the heartbeat of others, and the heartbeat within her because this felt different. It sounded different. She was well-aware of how heartbeats worked.
And she was registering a second rhythm inside her, one that wasn’t hers.
She and Kanto had been talking about having a kid for a while—they would be just as happy if it happened as they would if it didn’t. But this was happening. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure just yet, but it was a more than likely possibility.
With Kanto spending his morning on patrol and her not having much to do in her office, she radioed the Fire Palace to tell Katara that she had to be at the station as soon as humanly possible. Toph’s friend was there within the hour.
“So you’re not dying,” Katara said, crossing her arms and trying to catch her breath.
Toph raised her brow and popped a couple of nuts into her mouth. “I never said I was. I just said that I needed you here and I do.”
“Okay… so what’s going on? I swear that if you’ve called me here, pulled me away from my work, and my babies—”
“I’m pregnant,” Toph interrupted, dropping her feet from her desk. “Or at least I think I am, which is where you’d come in.”
The shock Katara was feeling was fairly evident to Toph in the way that she tensed and the way her heartbeat seemed to slow instead of quicken. Her brows were up in her hairline and her lips were parted in the kind of incredulity Toph loved to see on her. Speechlessness on her best friend was truly beautiful.
Her silence, however, had extended far beyond what Toph was able to tolerate at the moment because she was on the clock—Kanto would be back from his rounds in under an hour. With a huff, Toph grabbed a crumpled wad of paper on her desk and tossed it at Katara, who jumped when it hit her.
“You—I—this is amazing, Toph! Oh—oh my—I need to—oh wow,” Katara said when she was forced out of her astonishment and walked up to Toph’s desk. “Is there anywhere I can examine you? I need to know if—oh my goodness, this is great.”
Toph rolled her eyes, albeit fondly, at Katara. She knew that her reaction would be something to this effect, but to know that she wasn’t being judgemental—of course she wouldn’t have been, but still—was indescribable.
For forever, Toph had never considered being a mother. It was something that she couldn’t imagine, not because she didn’t think she could do it, but because she couldn’t see herself—pun unintended—being a mother, being motherly, being the one of two people a child relied on for everything for the better part of seventeen years. She was a perfectionist, she liked doing things to do them right and thoroughly, not mediocrely; and Toph wasn’t going to be one of those half-ass parents who had a kid and didn’t care to give them the time of day.
That’s what terrified her.
But then Kanto happened, and he changed her view of things, which was something of a rarity for Toph. She wasn’t one who was easily swayed, a fact that could’ve been easily supported by her best friends on any given day.
He’d told her after watching her play around with Kya and Izumi once that she would make an amazing mother—this was only three or four months after they got serious—and Toph had made a face at him. Kanto had laughed and told her, “I’m being serious. And I’m really not trying to make you consider anything, but… you would. If you only realized how amazing with them you are, I’m sure you’d agree.”
That had gotten her thinking, more than she would’ve liked, and a week after he’d told her that, she said to him, “If I ended up getting knocked up… would you—how would you—”
He interrupted her with a kiss. “I wouldn’t shut up about how I’m going to be the baba of the most amazing child known to man. And that’s solely because you’d be their mother.”
She’d shoved him away and grumbled all the while a blush tinted her cheeks.
From then on, though, she became more comfortable with the idea of being a mom. It was still something that scared the shit out of her, but she knew that if it happened, she wouldn’t not want it—she would embrace it because she would have him by her side.
And also Katara, who would most definitely be the person she would first run to if she ever freaked out about the baby.
Toph stood up from her desk and shrugged her shoulders. “So what do you need me to do?”
“Uh, do you have anywhere we can lay you down? I’d suggest your desk but—oh.” Katara stopped talking when Toph bent a platform large enough for her to lay on in the middle of her office. “We can do that too.”
With a snort, Toph bent her armor off and slid onto the makeshift examination table, lifting her undershirt to give Katara better access to her abdomen. A few seconds later, she heard the sound of flowing water as Katara manipulated it in her hands. A slight tingling sensation in her stomach followed.
Some nerves flooded Toph, her heart racing slightly as she tried to control her breathing and Katara did her thing.
“You’re just about to make the five-week mark,” Katara told Toph in her healer-mode voice moments later. “You’re going to need some teas to keep your body regulated and to prevent you from feeling sick at any point during the rest of your first trimester, but the baby’s looking good so far and that heartbeat’s as strong as it can be.”
Toph let out a breath that she didn’t know she was holding and felt her relief wash over her. She hadn’t been aware of how worried she was about the baby’s health and status, but she was ever so glad that everything was okay.
“Spirits, this is happening,” Katara said excitedly after a brief silence, her voice no longer doctorly, as she hovered her hands over Toph’s stomach. “This is happening, Toph.” A pause. “How—are you happy?”
Without hesitation, Toph bit back a smile and nodded. “Yeah, Sugar Queen. I’m happy. I think Kanto will be, too.”
Katara pulled her hands away from Toph’s abdomen and leaned back against the wall behind her as Toph stood and bent away their earthen examination table. “I’m so happy for you. How do you plan on telling him?”
“What do you mean how do I plan on telling him? I’m just—I’ll tell him I’m pregnant… nothing to it.”
“Please.” Katara rolled her eyes. “You should make it more creative than that. Kanto is… a bit airheaded when he wants to be, and I think you can have fun with that.”
Finding the idea intriguing, Toph arched an interested brow. Kanto was something of an oblivious man when he wasn’t tuned into what was happening.
Not long ago, he had insisted on making them dinner after a fairly long day. Neither of them had gotten much sleep, and Toph had told him that it was best they ate out to avoid any culinary mishaps—he was quite prone to them. Still, he said that he was in the mood to cook for them. A quick stir-fry, he’d said. Not wanting to fight him on it, she went along with it, only to find that he had prepped all the veggies and the meat and had begun to cook only the noodles with no kind of liquid to cook them in.
Their kitchen was set on fire because of it.
Kanto was an intelligent man, but a lot went over his head. A lot .
“It was…an oversight, okay?” he had told her as he held a rag over his nose to subdue to smell of burnt noodles spreading around the house. “I’m tired .”
“Hence the reason why I suggested we get take-out. I guarantee Narook’s wouldn’t have burnt their stir-fry.”
He gaped. “Mean.”
“Well-deserved.”
For the rest of that night, Kanto tried—but failed—to give her the silent treatment. His attempts lasted roughly fifteen minutes before he went over to her and kissed her when their takeout arrived.
So it was safe to say that she could indeed have fun with this as Katara had suggested.
After Katara hugged her and congratulated her for the trillionth time, Toph got to thinking about what she could do. It had to be something fun, creative, something he would never expect.
She set her hand to her stomach and her feet to the ground, finding solace and comfort in the beat of their baby’s heart, and then it hit her. They had a rare day off tomorrow—it would be perfect. The biggest grin spread across her face as she began to formulate a plan to set into motion.
“All right, Hotshot,” Toph said the next morning. “We’ve got a day off, and we’re going to use it productively.”
Kanto, barely awake, mumbled, “It’s too early.”
Pulling the blanket off of him, she clapped her hands, “It’s never too early to train. Hop to it, let’s go.”
He burrowed his face into his pillow before sitting up, grabbing her hand, and trying to tug her over to him. She held her ground as much as she wanted to crawl into bed with him, and he groaned, giving up. “Come lay with me first. Come on. This has been the only day off we’ve had in years and you want to train ? Instead of veg out in bed with me? Incredible.”
“Haven’t you been crying about how you want to figure out how to refine your seismic sense since we met? It’s now or never.”
“Wh—” Kanto sniffed. “Seismic sense? You—you’ve refused to teach me forever. Are you—what’s going on?”
Toph snorted. “Can’t a girl have a change of heart? I might just have another one and regret coming up with this idea in the first place if you don’t hurry up and come outside with me.”
She heard some shuffling and within seconds, his arms were around her waist and his face was buried in her neck. Toph chuckled and leaned into him for a second before shoving him away and telling him to get dressed and meet her outside in ten minutes.
The night prior, before Kanto had been able to leave work, Toph made sure to clear out the entire backyard of her home to make room for their training. It had been a while since she led any training sessions on the subject of seismic sense, about five or so years. The last time she had, she was still involved in the metalbending recruitment for the force. She pushed away the wave of nostalgia that was about to wash over her and focused on getting in her Sifu Zone before Kanto emerged from the house.
Ever the beauty queen he was, it took him just over ten minutes to meet her in the backyard. The pain the ass had managed to give himself a bath.
“I like starting my day fresh .”
Toph scoffed at him and reached out to ruffle his damp hair. “ Fresh just to sweat away all your cleanliness. Very smart of you, babe.”
“ Toph ,” he whined, dragging out the O and pushing her hand away in favor of brushing it back into place. Then, he groaned. “You’re ruining the ‘do.”
“Sad.”
Kanto crossed his arms over his chest at her lack of a reaction to his so-called dilemma, his brows knitted together. “It’s literally going to be standing up like this all day , thank you very much.”
“What a pickle.”
“It really is, actually.”
“Oh, boo fucking hoo. Get into your horse stance.”
Grumbling grumpily, Kanto walked off and stood a few feet away from her, his knees bent and his arms at his sides. She walked over to him to correct his stance, which was somewhat off. His elbows were too far off from his torso and his legs were too wide. Trying to hold back a laugh, she thought about the fact that they had spared enough for him to know better than this.
“Sloppy, sloppy, Hotshot. What’s gotten into you?”
He chuckled. “Something about being in a relationship with the greatest earthbender in the world might have something to do with it. I get to slack off.”
“Uh-huh.” She pulled back his shoulders and leaned into his ear. “Who says?”
“You—I mean, me,” he stammered. “I say. Me. I do.”
Toph got on her toes and kissed his temple before giving him a playful shove and getting back to work. “Okay, but seriously. Horse stance.”
He did as he was told—correctly, this time around— and asked, “So, what are we doing? Stretches? Breathing exercises? High-intensity earthbending? Where do we start, Chief?”
Toph pulled a blindfold out from her pocket and placed it over his eyes, tying it around his head. “You’re going to get used to feeling your surroundings rather than seeing them. When you’re earthbending, you obviously feel like you’re one with the earth, making it easier to control and manipulate. The same goes for metal—you’ve got to be in tune with it to be able to bend it. The foundation for all of this is—”
“Seismic sense, right.”
“Exactly, so you’re more than halfway there,” she confirmed, taking her place across from him in order to give him space. “Your ability to comprehend and communicate with your environment is exactly what you’re trying to achieve here. With it, you’ll be able to better observe your surroundings just as clearly as you do with your sight, and in my case, even more so, by detecting vibrations in the ground.
“The advantage of the sense over normal sight is that one can pick up on shit that’s out of one’s field of vision as well as things that are just dimly visible or even unnoticeable to what I can assume the human eye can perceive. Your goal here is to feel what you can’t see, and you’ll be a better bender after we’re done here.”
Kanto was nodding, taking in everything she was telling him. There was a barely perceptible crease between his brows, one that usually formed whenever he was concentrating on something and she tried not to laugh at him. She appreciated that he was taking this seriously, and why wouldn’t he?
From the moment they met the day he joined the force, he had been after her about refining his seismic sense, and she kept refusing. There wasn’t a palpable reason for him to do so. Sure, he would be able to have a leg up on the rest of the members of their team, but other than that, he was a perfectly good officer. And no one else had gotten special treatment from her—she didn’t need to start with him.
This was a special circumstance, though.
“Assess your environment as you would during a confrontation,” she instructed, then walked over to the other side of the backyard. “What do you see?”
“I see just about nothing right now.”
She summoned a chunk of the ground and sent it flying at his back, knocking him to the ground with a thud.
He grunted when it hit him. “A warning would’ve been nice!”
“First of all: where’s the fun in that?” she asked him with a smirk. “And second of all: you’re never going to learn if I warn you about things you should sense.”
“You make a great argument.”
She spent about an hour roaming around the backyard, sending chunks of earth and rocks at him, trying to get him to anticipate them and avoid the attacks to no avail. Toph could tell that he was becoming frustrated, so she stopped, went up to him, and grabbed his face in her hands.
“You can do this, okay? You’re a great bender, and this will set you over the top. You may even get a little reward after you’re all refined, so get it together, Hotshot. I know you’ve got this.”
He leaned into her touch. “I want this. And I don’t want to let you down.”
“Please.” She scoffed, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “You’ll never let me down. Not when it comes to this at least, I’m sure you’ll pull something stupid one of these days.”
“Gee, thanks, babe .”
A snort. “Quit lamenting and get to work.”
Another few hours passed and little progress was made. He was able to stop her attacks when he felt the earth moving toward him, but when she moved onto sensing her whereabouts, he was only able to do so by listening for her voice.
“You’re cheating,” she told him. “We both know you have the sense of hearing—you don’t need to prove that.”
“I can’t help it!”
“Yes, you can,” Toph insisted sternly, her teaching side coming out. She wasn’t going to treat him with kid gloves right now. As much as she was doing this for him to learn that she was pregnant by feeling the baby’s heartbeat himself, she wanted him to be able to get a grip on this. It would help him become a better deputy chief, and it would help keep him out of harm’s way. “ Feel the earth, Kanto. Feel the way it works, the way it carries your weight, my weight, the weight of everything on it. Feel what’s within and the vibrations each of those things cause no matter how unmoving or inanimate they are.”
Kanto nodded, determined. and she could feel him adjust his stance and firmly stomp the ground a few times as he tried to get a grip on his surroundings. She took this opportunity to quietly make her way over to the large cherry blossom and lean against its trunk as he got himself together.
“Wait—oh, Toph! I can—you’re over there, by the tree!” Kanto exclaimed, pulling the blindfold off his head and tossing it aside not even five minutes later. “And I can feel you and—“ He paused. “Is there… is there anyone else here? Did you invite someone over?”
She pursed her lips, pride and nerves swirling in her stomach. “Mm, nope. Not to my recollection.”
“Then why is there—there’s another…heartbeat, Toph. Why are there three heartbeats?”
Toph was trying her damndest to keep the smile off her face but she was failing miserably. She cocked her head to the side when she stood up. “Are there? I wonder why that is, actually. Mind telling me?”
He took a few slow, heavy steps toward her, and stopped just short of a few feet away from her. Then, he crouched, his hand flat on the ground between them. “Is that—Toph, are we having a baby? Am I feeling our baby’s heartbeat right now?”
“Quick learner you are, Baba.” Toph beamed, her eyes unexpectedly watery as he stood up and lifted her up off the ground.
They were laughing and crying and, Spirits, she wasn’t sure she’d ever been so happy in her entire life. He wanted this, it was more than evident. She knew he would, but to know how he felt about it now, to know that he was just as elated as she was about the news, despite any trepidation she felt about the idea—the reality —of becoming a parent, brought her so much solace.
After a while of spinning, he set her onto the ground and kissed her sweetly, and pulled away after a while, his forehead resting against hers. “This is happening. We’re—we’re having a baby?”
“It’s really happening.”
“You’re going to be a mama.”
“And you’re going to be a father,” she said softly. “An amazing one. I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
He lightly pressed another kiss to her lips, then suddenly laughed, letting himself fall onto the ground, pulling her with him. “This was really clever, you know.”
“The seismic sense training? Of course it was. You weren’t going to suspect a thing.”
“Spirits, you’re something else.”
She snickered, laying her head on his chest. “You know how much I love a grand gesture.”
Hours later, after they were settled and Kanto stopped complaining about how he was going to wake up with a multitude of bruises all over his body and Toph was settled down and in bed, she heard panicked whispering coming from their sitting room. She furrowed her brows and pushed herself out of bed to find out what was going on.
He seemed to be on a call with Katara—Toph could hear her clearly on the other line.
“Kanto, that won’t happen.”
“Okay, but I heard a myth that if a woman touches metal during an eclipse while pregnant—”
“Kanto—“
“—the baby will—”
“Hey, stop . It won’t happen. And you can’t believe everything you hear. You guys are going to be fine , and the baby is going to be fine . I promise, and I’ll tell you if anything’s wrong, okay?”
He paused and took a deep breath. “Okay… okay, you—you really think everything’s going to be alright?”
“I do , and I know you guys will be, too,” Katara replied. “If you have any other questions, or if you think anything’s wrong, don’t hesitate to call, but I swear that if you bring me another list of myths that include anything similar to the one about the baby being born orange if Toph eats oranges, I will personally kick your ass.”
Toph had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing aloud at that. Kanto himself guffawed. “Right, okay. Fair enough.”
“Now go to sleep and hug your girlfriend. We’ll talk soon.”
They bade each other good night and the line went dead and Kanto turned toward where Toph stood at the doorway. “I know you’re there, babe.”
She snorted, walking toward him and into his arms. “I knew refining your seismic sense was going to backfire.”
“Oh, it’s going to be amazing. No more sneaking up on me.”
“Hmm, we’ll see about that.”
They were quiet for a bit, slightly swaying in each other’s embrace and Toph enjoyed the sound of his heart beating in her ear. Kanto kissed the crown of her head, pulling her closer. “This is really happening, right? It’s not—I’m not having some kind of excitement-induced reaction to being able to properly use seismic sight? We’re actually going to have a baby?”
“We’re actually going to have a baby, Hotshot.”
And she was over the moon about it.