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Toph has known from the moment she started spending her nights with Kanto that he’s a sleep-talker.
The man could go on unique, never-ending rants for minutes on end without taking a breath while in his sleep. She finds it incredibly impressive, and quite funny at times, especially when he says things he doesn’t mean to say.
But at this hour, at the ass-crack of dawn, she’s simply stunned as she lays in bed, her eyes wide, her heart racing, and her hands clamming up as the words she’s just heard Kanto utter bounce around in her head.
Toph—I love you.
At the sound of Kanto’s sleepy mumbling, she rose from her sleep, ready to gently coax him back into slumberland. Her fingers were combing through his hair and she was whispering sweet, incoherent nothings into his ear to get him back to sleep when she heard him.
If she really intended on going to sleep after hearing what he said, she’s insane. She’s wide fucking awake now…
The likelihood is that she’s getting ahead of herself. He probably meant to say something else, or maybe, since he was so deeply sleeping, he just said the words without even meaning them. She likely even misheard him for all she knows. She’s dead tired, anyway.
Her hands are clutching the much-too-large shirt of his that she’s wearing and she’s trying to stop herself from waking him up and demanding answers that she knows she shouldn’t ask right now.
She knows well that she’s not overreacting. Those three words are words she's never uttered herself, and the fact that the man she’s decided to get serious with for the first time… ever, really, said them is sending her into a mental spiral right now.
Their time together so far has been more than Toph ever wanted or expected or ever thought she’d enjoy. So much of their relationship is based on communication and on what they have in common but also on their intimacies and the way they connect. She’s never felt the way she feels for Kanto for anyone, and the thought alone scares her.
They’ve been together for, what? A month give or take? And he’s already sure about this?
The fact that he’s managed to innocently and unconsciously say those three words to her is making her overthink everything because what if he tells her eventually and she’s not ready to reciprocate? What if he ends up not even telling her and it was just a phrase he voiced in slumber? What if she does love him and he didn’t even mean what he said?
Toph isn’t ready to get hurt. It’s the exact reason why she didn’t even want to get into this relationship in the first place.
But she couldn’t help it. The man is… something else.
Kanto is the kind of person one just gravitates to, no matter how much one tries to resist. He’s charming, loyal, outgoing, humorous, quippy… he’s just—he’s everything she never knew she wanted.
And now… he’s said something that she’s not sure he can take back because she’s got his words on a loop.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Before she delves deeper into her spiral, the alarm clock on her nightstand sounds and she quickly reaches over to silence it. Sitting up and swinging her legs off her bed stealthily, she runs a hand down her face as though that would wipe away her current anxieties before standing up and shuffling to the bathroom.
For some reason, Toph doesn’t return to bed at any point to press a kiss on Kanto’s forehead like she usually does before she leaves for work.
Toph spends the entire day avoiding Kanto as best as she possibly can, both trying to get her mind off how his whole sleepy confession is making her feel and attempting to give herself time to think about what this could all mean for them.
That is if he even means what he said, which he probably doesn’t.
Even at lunch, she manages to keep herself busy with buried cases and training, and briefings. Her secretary informs her various times throughout the day that Kanto has made attempts to communicate with her and Toph simply tells her that he can wait.
At one point, however, when the day is nearing its end, her boyfriend ends up cornering her when she’s cleaning up the training dojo on the basement floor of the precinct. She’d just gotten done training the incoming officers on how to handle their metal weaponry. Believe it or not, the trainees have a seriously hard time getting a handle on them.
“I feel like I haven’t seen you all day,” he tells her as she’s packing up the training cables. “I missed you.”
“And I’ve never seen you so sucks to suck, I guess.”
Kanto pauses at her frigid tone. “You good?”
“Yup, why wouldn’t I be? Just, you know, busy.”
“Is that why you’re avoiding me?”
Toph stops what she’s doing and turns to face him. “I’m not avoiding you. Why would I be avoiding you?”
“Many reasons,” he says with a shrug, walking up to her. She sucks in a breath as he continues, “Did I do something?”
Yeah, she thinks, you’ve made me overthink everything.
“You didn’t—” A sigh. “You didn’t do anything, okay? Everything’s fine, now give me a minute so I can finish this up and we’ll get together at home.”
Knowing it would be useless to argue, Kanto simply exhales, presses a kiss to her forehead, and takes his leave.
Toph puffs out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding and slumps against the wall nearest to her. This whole thing shouldn’t be a cause for stress. They just—they need to have a conversation. Just two adults talking about how one of them said something in his sleep that’s making the other party involved characteristically skittish.
Easy.
With a groan at her vacuity, Toph takes her time finishing up in the dojo and locking it up behind her. She takes another while gathering her things from her office and heading off to pick up dinner and drinks for them. They tend to have takeout dinners during the week because they’re usually too tired to get dinner done on their own time once they get home at the end of the day.
All in all, it takes Toph about two hours to get home when she usually does what she must to get home as fast as humanly possible.
Chronic avoidance is a real disease; Toph would know.
Once she’s home, she heaves a sigh before pushing her front door open and tossing all the items in her hands onto the kitchen counter. At the racket she’s making, Kanto walks in and snakes his hands around her waist.
“Took you long enough.”
“What can I say? I’m thorough.”
He laughs into her neck and leaves a kiss there before letting her go in favor of peeking into the takeout bags, pulling out their contents, and walking them over to the tea table in the living room before plopping onto the couch to wait for her to join him.
The thought of her having to bring up the whole sleep-talking thing is already ridding her of any hunger she may have had, but she steels herself, takes a swig of the beer she just cracked open, and takes one over to Kanto.
“Since I didn’t see you much today,” he says as soon as her ass hits the couch, “tell me about your day.”
Instead of responding to his indirect question, she asks, “You know you talk in your sleep, right?”
A pregnant silence, then, a hum of realization. “What did I say? Did I accidentally call Katara a honey bee again?”
Despite her slight distress, Toph snorts at this, remembering the time that he was so delirious that he accidentally called Katara “Honey Bee” instead of Toph’s nickname for her—Sugar Queen. It’d been a wild night at the palace as they made fun of Kanto for it, and she was sure that he’ll never live it down.
“No, Kanto, that’s not what you said.”
“Then what did I say to make you avoid me?”
“I wasn’t—”
He scoffs, putting his food down and taking her hand. “You should already know that you’re not a good liar—at least not when you try lying to me. Now, spit it out, Chief, because I really want more than grunts of acknowledgment when I lay in bed beside you tonight.”
Toph sighs, hating that he knows her so damn well, and thinks about the consequences of telling him about this. Will he laugh in her face and tell her that he didn’t say that? Would he say he didn’t mean it?
She mentally shakes herself off. It’s stupid for her to be overanalyzing this. She’s not that kind of person. And if anything he says ends up being what happens, she can just shrug, let it roll off her back, and tell him to go to have a playdate with Agni.
But as soon as that thought comes to mind, she realizes that she doesn’t want that to be the case. She wants him to say that he might not have meant to say it the way he did, but that he means it, nonetheless—that he loves her.
That he loves her the way she loves him.
Kanto squeezes her hand, bringing her back to their conversation. “Toph?”
“I love you,” she blurts. “I mean—I—that’s—that’s what you said in your sleep last night. And my response to that is that I love you too. Now, if you didn’t mean to say it, I could give two flying mmhph— ”
He cuts her off with a kiss that expels every single word from her mind. She melts as he cradles her face in his warm hands and pours every ounce of affection he feels for her into the action.
Her stomach swirls as their kiss deepens, and she moans into his mouth, clutching at his nightshirt as though it’s a lifeline before they breathlessly pull away.
Kanto kisses her one more time, slowly, so much so that she thanks whatever entity possessed her to sit down before having this conversation. “I love you. I love you so much, and I want to kick myself so hard for just—for saying it in my sleep of all ways, but that doesn’t make it any less true, okay? I love you.”
She sniffles, licking her lips a bit. “Well. You don’t have to be such a sad sap about it.”
“I won’t apologize for that.”
“You should.”
“I won’t.”
“Fine.”
“Great.”
“Fine.”
“I love you.”
Biting her cheek in a failed attempt to keep from smiling, Toph kisses him again and says, “I love you, too.”