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Lin bites down on the toy her mother carved out of the earth for her.
"No, no, no, we do not eat the rock." Toph scoops her daughter out of the sand and takes the earthen toy out of her hands. "We try to eat the rock, but we find it is very tough and hurts and-- actually, you can find all of this out for yourself."
Toph, however, is mindlessly fingering the small toy in her hands, an easily made figurine of her old friend Appa. She didn't have to think hard to break it free of the cliffside; her old adventures are always in her mind. How she misses the wind in her hair, the heartbeats of her friends all around her, how their laughter would fill her ears when she made her remarks. The memories are always flooding back, and always so far away.
"Mom!" her daughter whines. "I want my toy!"
And just like that, she is back in mom mode.
"Alright, fine, go enjoy your meal." Toph hands little rock-bison back to Lin and sets her back on the ground. She feels her daughter run off back towards the beach, and stays herself on the paved patio of her summerhouse, listening to the sea.
Her life is a solitary one now, save for her little girl. She did not know how it would feel to love so deeply until she met her little Lin.
She wakes up her daughter, she takes her for her morning walk and makes her three meals a day, but if she ever has a moment to herself she feels that unbearable loneliness creep itself around her neck and choke her.
This is how she feels now.
A sensation makes her ears prick. Lightly, ever so lightly, there is another set of footfalls on her property. They are coming up the pathway of the front yard, these vibrations she has not felt in so long. She would recognise them anywhere, any day.
Before she can stop herself, she strides through her back door, through her house, and opens her front door expectantly.
"Twinkle toes?"
A pair of strong arms wrap around her and lift her off the ground, spinning her around. "My favourite bandit!" Aang's voice is like water after a drought to her. "I hope you don't mind," he sets her down, "I heard a rumour you would be here and it's- it's been so long, and you never wrote, I really just wanted to see you."
"Well, here I am." Toph cocks her head, "How do I look?"
Toph's hair is slightly unkempt, tied up high and out of her face with a few scraggly pieces falling over her eyes. She has dirt on her knees and sand under her nails, and a bruise on her upper arm that has purpled. A few wrinkles are starting to make their home on her forehead, and her summer clothes hang loosely on her short, stocky frame.
If Aang were to be honest, he would say, 'you look as beautiful as the day I last saw you, all those years ago. You look perfect.'
But he is not honest. "Tired," he jokes, instead.
"Yeah, no wonder," Toph says with a light chuckle. "Come in, please. We have a lot to catch up on."
He follows her inside, noting the bare yet homely feel of her house. The lower floor seems smaller than the upper, a simple living room with stairs at the back of the house and a square kitchen tucked into the corner. Miniature dolls of turtleducks, catgators and lion turtles are scattered on the floor of the living space, and in the kitchen a short table sits in the corner, crude drawings scattered on its surface.
"You're... drawing?" Aang asks curiously.
"Oh no, not me." Toph answers as she reaches for her kettle.
A patter of stumbling feet catches Aang's attention, and he walks over to look out of the window. A small girl, no older than six, is running towards the back door from the beach. Her knee is scraped and tears are running down her face.
"Mom!" the little girl cries desperately, entering the house and running straight into Toph's arms, sniffing, "Mommy, I fell over and I-"
Toph swoops the dark-haired girl off the ground as she coos gently, "oh no, little swamp monster, what a tragedy." She brushes the hair from the little girl's face and kisses her forehead.
Aang feels like the ground beneath him is shifting, pulling away from him. He watches in a trance as Toph grabs a cloth with one hand and effortlessly holds her daughter - her daughter - against her hip with her other arm. She smiles passively at the Avatar as she takes her daughter - HER DAUGHTER - into the living space and begins to clean up the wound. He takes a deep and shaky breath and turns around, entering the main room to stay with the company he sought.
"Who's the tall man, mommy?" The dark-haired girl is holding tightly on to a toy and staring at Aang with watery, hardened eyes that are so similar to her mother's.
Toph leans back on her knees. "Do you remember the bedtime stories, about fighting the king-of-getting-his-butt-whooped, and the friends I fought with?" Her voice is soft and full of love, her back to Aang.
The child's eyes light up, "He's one of the ones you fought with?" she asks excitedly, "Which one, which one is he?" it seems the pain in her knee is a lifetime ago, now, yet blood still drips down on to her pant leg.
After a moment, Aang takes some water from the pouch at his hip and bends it in the way his wife taught him. It glows dimly with healing potential and he approaches the young girl and holds the water against her knee. The wound seals itself up, the only memory of the injury being the blood on her trousers and on the cloth in Toph's hand. "My name is Aang," he says, "what's yours?"
"My name is Lin." The girl responds very matter-of-factly. "Are you really the Avatar?" she asks as she pokes at her refreshed knee. "How did you do that? Can you show me some firebending? Where do you live?"
Aang chuckles and looks at Toph, beside him with the rag in her hand. Her whole demeanor makes sense now, the way she holds herself and the way she looks. His old friend cracks a grin at him before turning back to Lin, "that's a lot of questions, little Lin, when I've not seen my friend in years!" Toph picks her up again as she stands and throws her up in the air, catching her effortlessly. Aang watches Toph's biceps, which he remembers pushing boulders and triggering earthquakes, flex as she swings her daughter around. "How's this, swamp monster?"
Without warning, the master earthbender stamps the ground, and eight shapes come clattering out from the rock floor. They are in different shapes - a star, a square, a circle, among others. Lin raises her arms and cries, "Chaos!"
"You put these shapes back in the right hole, and then you try and seal them up the way you see Mom do it." she puts Lin back down on the floor and kisses the top of her head.
"Avatar Aang," Lin says, "Can you look after my toy, please?"
Aang agrees and holds out his hand, and Lin kisses her toy before handing it to her new friend. His face is unreadable as he looks down and sees a little rock Appa in his hand. Toph punches his arm noncholantly and walks past him into the kitchen, and he watches incredulously as Lin put the square in the square hole and stamp at the ground, her tongue sticking out in concentration. He composes himself and follows Toph.
As he reenters the kitchen, Toph starts to chat as she pours tea for them both. "They say kids learn bending at different ages, but I knew way more than my girl at her age. I'm figuring out whether to leave her to it or step in and help. Maybe I should just throw metal at her or something."
Aang quietly takes the tea as it is handed to him and inhales deeply, his eyes to the ceiling. He exhales and sets his sights on his old friend. "Why didn't you tell any of us? About Lin?"
Toph circles the rim of her teacup. "I've been traveling. Wanted some time to see the world, wanted to introduce her to the world. We've seen a lot, and now she wants friends, so we've settled down. I thought just outside Gaoling was... nice. We could see Dad at the old estate. He gets lonely now that Mom's gone."
Aang nods. "Your dad sent me a letter a few days ago, I told him to update me if he heard from you. We've all been worried about you."
Toph simply scoffs, before a silence crawls over the room. The china occassionally shakes as Lin stomps, trying to reseal the earth.
Aang looks down at the toy in his hand. "Where's Kanto?" He asks.
Toph can sense the change in Aang's heartbeat, and worries her lip as she leans against the bar. She has taught him too well, and she knows lying won't work here. "He left." is all she says at first. She blows on her tea, takes a sip, puts it down on the side. "I told him about Lin, I was... I was so excited, and he leaves within the week. Wasn't even here for the birth."
Aang takes a gulp of his tea, the water scalding his throat, and thinks of getting closer to Toph. His feet stay firmly on the floor. "Why would he do that?"
"Hah, more like, why didn't he do that sooner? I was stupid, really. Swept up by my childish ideas of romance. He was the first person to make me feel the way I felt when I was with you-- you guys, the gang." Toph shakes her head, as if shaking away hard memories, and her eyes betray her with tears. "I'm, uh, I'm happy here now though. With my little person."
"You shouldn't have had to do it alone though. We could've helped. Me and Kat weren't too busy, we always would've been down to--"
"How are the kids?" Toph interrupts, picking up her tea again.
Aang finds himself smiling instinctively. "They're so good. Bumi's been with Sokka a lot, he can throw a boomerang as well as anyone. Kya-" Aang grimaces, "Kya's a waterbender, we learned, and she takes a lot after her mother. Not so much me. And you remember Katara was pregnant; it was another boy. Tenzin."
"How is Katara?"
Aang takes another long gulp of his drink. "She's well." he says simply. The air is thick and uncomfortable. "She's at the Fire Nation right now, helping Zuko with a trade deal."
Toph nods slowly. "A trade deal." she repeats, unconvinced.
Aang continues, "She took the kids with her because I had Avatar business to sort out, just some really boring stuff. So once I'd dealt with that, I came home to an empty house and a letter from your dad and, boy, was that the best letter I'd ever recieved. So I came here as soon as I could."
"Mom, I can't do it!" Lin calls from the living area. Toph goes to put her tea down, but Aang places his own cup on the side, lightly touches Toph's arm, and paces out of the room. Her cheeks heat, recalling the brief touch, as she listens to the action. "You're not mom." she hears Lin complain.
"You're right." Toph feels Aang's weight shift lower to the floor; he's kneeling next to Lin. "I'm cooler than your mom. Can your mom do this?"
"Woah!" Lin exclaims, "you're like a human torch!"
"Fire was really, really hard to learn, you know. I had to think a lot about," his weight is shifting, he's sitting now, "control, and patience."
"I can't do firebending," Lin replies, "I've tried."
"But you can earthbend?" Aang asks. Toph sips her tea and smiles to herself.
"Yeah, I did it in the swamps. We found weird rocks, and I got really excited, and blam!" the house shakes slightly as Lin jumps, "I moved them with my mind!"
"That's so awesome!"
"Yeah, and, and, now I can't do it again because the rocks aren't cool here, they're stupid sand rocks and don't have those shiny bits in them."
"You know what a really, really smart earthbender taught me?" Aang asks. His voice is a whisper, but Toph has good hearing.
Lin scooches closer, also whispering - albeit poorly. "No, please tell me, please tell me about the smart earthbender."
"They said there's no different angles to earthbending," Aang is lifting himself into a squat, "no clever solutions, no trickedy-tricks," Lin, Toph can tell, is hanging on to his every word, "you have to face it head on." There is a moment. "Like this!" Aang says, and Toph feels the earth shift as a small chunk is taken from her living room floor.
"Wah!" Lin's weight shifts and a clattering smash is heard across the house. She breathes, giggles, jumps into the air. "I... I did it! I did it, I did it, Mommy, I did it!"
Toph finally places her empty cup on the side as she feels Lin rush in to the kitchen, easily picking her up and holding her against her hip. "What did you do?" Toph smiles as Aang follows her daughter into the room.
"The Avatar threw a rock at me and I threw it over my head and I broke your plate!" Lin exclaims, punching the air.
"Ohh, you broke my plate!" Toph nods, shooting a glance at Aang. At her look, Aang shrugs and chuckles. "You are so cool, little Lin. Do you think Aang was better at earthbending because he was closer to the ground?"
Lin thinks, only for a moment. "Yeah!" she agrees.
"Do you want to practice outside, throwing the rock like the Avatar did?"
Lin nods vigorously, "Yeah!"
"Off we go then!" Toph jogs outside and almost throws Lin on to the sandy beach, running after her.
Aang is left in his old friend's kitchen. His face is flushed and his mouth feels dry. He places his hands down on the counter, facing away from the window, and closes his eyes as if it can block out the laughter from the beach behind him.
He is trying so very hard to be normal right now.
Toph, however, is making that very hard. She isn't even doing anything. He never imagined her a mother; she always seemed like too flighty a spirit to settle down with a family. But it is so obvious now, of course she would be a good mother. He'd just been so ignorant for years; once he and Katara were official, he found himself avoiding the moments with just him and Toph because of how she made him feel. He knew she liked him. He'd liked her too, but he'd always been so blinded with Katara around.
Katara was not around anymore. She was distant, in the times they spent together. A mother first, and a wife second - if a wife at all, these days. She was kidding herself if she thought Aang had not caught on to her travels, her rendezvous with Fire Lord Zuko. And Aang knew he could not see any of himself in his middle child, his sweet, blazing daughter.
This bitterness has led to a dull ache in the years of Toph's absence; it was a fact Aang had simply accepted. And now with the loss of his passion for Katara, a new and dangerous feeling was growing at the sight of Toph and her daughter. On the counter, the little Appa figurine sat in all of its detailed glory. She had put much thought into the toy, he could see, from the accurate saddle to the little horns and the indented arrow.
She had spent the last seven years alone.
"Whew, always hard work," Toph said as she appeared behind Aang. He turned around, very naturally. "You're acting weird."
Okay, not very naturally. He swallowed. "I'm just thinking, is all,"
"Hmm, a dangerous pasttime for sure." She filled her cup with water and came to lean on the counter next to Aang. He could feel the sand on her arm as it brushed against his. "Thank you, for helping Lin."
"It was my pleasure. She's such a lovely kid. She just needed some tough love," he says in his friend's ear.
Toph leans her head on Aang's arm and watches her daughter through the window. She is taking handfuls of sand and throwing them, yelling. "If I'm honest, it's hard work, alone. I wish... no, never mind."
Aang turns to look at Toph. "Please, continue,"
Toph faces up at Aang and smirks. "I wish I'd asked for help sooner. Not just run off."
Aang takes Toph's hand in his own and squeezes. "Can you promise me that you won't run off again? That you'll ask us for help if you need it?"
Toph squeezes back. "You're a sop, twinkletoes." she smiles, smacking his face jokingly. Oh, ew, he's grown a beard.
"I'm gonna be honest, I don't know what that means."
"Will you stay for dinner?" Toph changes the subject. Aang heartily agrees.
Lin is ecstatic to have one of her heroes staying for dinner, and even happier to spend the rest of the evening playing pretend with him as he regales Avatar stories with vigor and uses his bending to create scenery for the toys' adventures. Toph sits on the bench in the corner and listens, resting for the first time in years. At bedtime, Aang and Toph do a joint bedtime story, the story of Aang's first earthbending lesson, before leaving a drifting Lin to her dreams and making their way to the beachside and the cool nighttime air.
"I've been saving this for a special occassion," Toph says from the doorframe as she waves a bottle of Fire Nation wine, "I think this is as good as any."
She is wearing an overly large cotton tunic and her hair falls loosely, carelessly tied back into a low ponytail. Aang has taken off his red overshirt and is shoeless, his yellow shirt unbuttoned and loose. He shuffles along the driftwood log he sits on as Toph joins him and uncorks the bottle. "Glasses?" he asks.
"That is washing up that I simply do not have time to do." She responds with a shrewd smile, taking a swig from the bottle and passing it to Aang.
Aang hesitates, before delicately taking a drink. Returning the bottle to Toph, he lets the burn in his throat die down before saying, "you never answered me before."
She tilts the bottle and takes a large gulp. "I don't know what you're talking 'bout." She says. She passes the bottle back. "Don't be a pussy with your portions this time."
Apprehensively, Aang tips his head back and takes a swig. At Toph's behest, he takes another. "Gah," he gasps, the wine sticking to his tongue and burning his throat.
"Thatta boy," she says with a grin. Aang is taken aback at how beautiful she looks, once again, and he is trying his best to snap himself out of it. He takes another sip before handing the bottle back. He folds his hands in his lap and focuses on them. "Hey," Toph says, chuckling, "you threw a rock at my daughter!"
He laughs too, unable to close himself off to her.
It is astounding to Toph how quickly they can return to what was once normal. As teenagers, after the war was over, the gang would sneak out at night with wine stolen from Zuko's palace and drink around a campfire. Toph recalls the crackling flame, the conversations that would take place, the comfortable silences where they could be themselves, rest, without the weight of the world.
And here she is, with her oldest friend, resting.
They share the bottle and as the night stretches on they lean on each other, Aang staring at the sky and Toph listening to the sea. There is a perfect quietness that makes Toph feel safer than she has for years.
"I can't believe Kanto would do that to you." Aang says out of nowhere.
Toph passes the bottle over. "You can't really dwell on it." she explains as Aang swallows a larger, longer swig of wine. "It hurt. It hurt a lot. I wanted someone to be in it with me. Not forever, not all the time. But man, he doesn't even visit. I'd go mad if I think about it too much."
Aang turns to face Toph. "You deserve someone who visits. You deserve someone who helps you with your little girl. You deserve someone who actually cares about you." he says strongly.
She swings her leg over the log to face him fully. "Someone like you?" she elicits softly. Emboldened by the wine, she puts a hand on his face, stroking his cheek with her thumb.
Under her hand, she feels the blood rush to his face, "...Like me?" he breathes.
His hand is on top of hers now, and she digs her feet into the sand. "This is too bold." she scolds herself.
"You're right though."
The air between them crackles, tensions shifting.
"Do you ever feel that you've made the wrong choice?" Toph asks in a whisper, her face close to Aang's.
"I do," he mumbles, "and it's only today that I have realised," he kisses Toph's nose, "how wrong I have been."
They break their fast together in the morning. Lin is oblivious to the glint in her mother's eyes, but is overjoyed to hear Avatar Aang will be coming over to visit soon with his own children. After breakfast, as she runs around outside and practices her quasi-horse stance, her mother shares an embrace with the Avatar.
"If you ask me," Toph chides lightly, "that was a long time coming."
Aang kisses the top of her head and holds her tighter. "Do you promise, now, to stick with the group?"
She breathes deeply in his arms. "Alright, twinkletoes. I promise. So long as you're around, I'll reach out."