Chapter Text
prologue
The promise of more never quite enticed Toph. She wasn’t one to be easily beguiled because she was the one who often did the beguiling, to begin with. She was strong, unmoving, and brash—qualities that usually attracted people to her and that she made no effort to embellish because that wasn’t the person she was.
She was humored by the promise of more, in fact. People very frequently made promises they couldn’t keep and claims that weren’t true, despite knowing full well that she could snuff out their fibs and half-truths within seconds. Toph wasn’t one to humor the disingenuous, but there were times that called for it, and those times were quite often. It always pleased her to catch a liar with his pants down by his ankles.
Literally.
Strings and strings of lovers that meant nothing to her kept her occupied when she needed her boredom to be sated, when she needed someone to fill the void left by the man she once loved but had lost and would never find again. So, no, the promise of more never again meant anything to Toph after his death—she just found it fun to entertain, if only for a few hours every other evening.
Still, even so, the day she met Kanto was the day that all changed, no matter how much she didn’t want it to.
His touch, his kiss, his love. It was all like a jolt of electricity that brought Toph back from whatever daze she was in. He kept her going in a way that no one had since the death of the man she loved. He gave her a reason to awaken each day with hope and desire and hunger.
And as much as she tried to hate him, as much as she tried to deny the attraction she felt for him, as much as she kept drilling into herself that this was lust, as much as she tried to keep her growing affection for him from increasing, it was a suicide mission. She never had a chance.
Soon, her endless string of lovers was no longer a string, but a single fiber that made her feel what none of them had managed to. He kept her grounded, something that an earthbender craves.
It was like she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help what she felt about him or what she thought about him.
She couldn’t help but love him.
And that had been the one thing she promised herself she’d never do again.
one lie
Toph vowed to never love again.
The mere idea of loving someone after the person she loved the most was stripped away from her mercilessly and relentlessly was impossible. It was intangible. She could never go through what she went through when she lost him again. She was not going to put herself through it and she wished it upon no one.
Her belief in love was born with the one she lost, and it was killed the same moment he was, and she knew that it would never come back to her. She didn’t want it to if it didn’t come from him.
But the void she’d been nursing for months since his death needed filling, so she got it filled. Over and over again by different men that she would come across, much to the dismay of those who cared about her. And as much as she valued their opinions, she couldn’t care less about them.
Things began to change for her when, one day after work, she found herself feeling particularly lonely at the tavern she frequented. None of her regulars were present, but a familiar heartbeat crept into her awareness and she thought herself intrigued.
Kanto had always captivated her. He was confident without being cocky; he was intelligent and knowledgeable without being a show-off; he was hilarious without ever really trying; and he kept up with her shit—good or not. They worked well together and many said that they had good chemistry.
That night, Toph decided that she would put that last point to the test if he was willing, which she was one hundred percent sure that he was.
Attraction was easy to pinpoint, she always thought. There was a spike in heartbeats and fidgeting of limbs and an increase in overall nerves, all of which she felt when Kanto was around her. She didn’t pay any mind to it because she simply refused to sleep with anyone she worked with, despite the interest many of them showed.
It wasn’t easy to convince Kanto that she was approaching him in earnest. For some reason, he doubted her intentions; figured that she was just trying to get him caught up in a human resources nightmare. To this, she merely laughed, laying a hand on his upper thigh (she relished the feeling of him tensing up at the action), and assured him that she was coming to him for personal and selfish reasons. Perhaps, she told him, he too had an itch that needed scratching. A void that needed filling.
They found themselves tangled in each other after he led her to his apartment in the city. It was explosive with him, only rivaling the loving of her lost love. Her skin grew so sensitive at his touch from the moment they first made contact with each other, the heat of his hands and the feel of his breath against her skin were terribly orgasmic. One can only imagine how the sex was after the mere pre-show.
Months went by and they kept at it monogamously, then months evolved into a year. It became addicting. She grew addicted to the way he felt. To the way sex with him felt. To the way he held her and touched her and kissed her and fucked her. To him.
She was not afraid of what it meant because it meant nothing. She knew it meant nothing, no matter how he made her feel. No matter what people were saying about how close they’d gotten lately. No matter how much they actually had grown together. No matter how many times she’d asked him to stay with her and felt herself soften each time he agreed to do so. No matter how many times she wanted it all to be more with him.
It meant nothing.
And when one day she wondered whether it did mean more, whether what she felt could be love, she immediately shut the silly idea down.
She didn’t love Kanto. She couldn’t.
one half-truth
Fear was unfamiliar. It was foreign.
Sure, there were moments when she had to admit a bout of self-doubt or slight trepidation in the face of something that was meant to be a threat, that was meant to stir up dread because she was only human, but Toph could not say that she often felt fear. So much so that it was simply an alien feeling.
But the moment she set her feet to the ground and found a twin heartbeat within her, fear was all she knew.
Motherhood was never something Toph considered. But then, as she focused on the life growing in her womb, she figured that she wasn’t fit for it.
For a while, after she confirmed the validity of her hunch with Katara, Toph kept the news to herself. She knew that Kanto was the father, but she didn’t know if he wanted to be one. And even so, even if he didn’t want to go through with this with her, Toph knew that she had it handled. She would be the mother of this child, come hell or high water, and her kid would make out like a bandit covered in riches, father or not.
What she didn’t count on, however, was Kanto knowing her better than she accounted for. He knew that something was up, that something was different, the moment she stepped into the precinct the morning of the discovery. She ignored every single one of his advances, and their playdates were put on pause indefinitely.
He was not having it.
Using a trick he learned from her, Kanto metalbent himself into her apartment, made a joke about never having thought that he would ever recur to breaking and entering, and held her face in his hands before asking what was going on.
Toph pushed him away, but he took her hand and pulled her into him. Talk to me, he said so gently that she broke.
When she told him, the slight tension in Kanto’s shoulders melted away and he released a surprised exhale. He kissed her, and she kissed him, her insides warm and gushing, but she shoved him away again when she came to her senses. She didn’t let the tears in her eyes fall and allowed herself to feel the pain building up in her chest before telling him to leave.
She was starting to let herself love him. But she knew that she couldn’t do this, any of this, with him.
one truth
On her eighth month of pregnancy and seventh month without speaking to Kanto about anything other than work, Toph decided it was high time to pay her lost love a visit. She’d neglected him long enough and she felt too pained to not want to feel close to him.
She knew she’d made the right decision when she felt the sun shining directly on her and when the wind picked up as soon as she arrived at his grave.
The tears that fell were unrelenting, especially when the words the fire lord had told her not long ago rang in her ears as she sunk down to kiss her love’s headstone.
“You have to let go,” Zuko had said to her over tea, sounding too much like his uncle. “And you knew him better than anyone—he would want you to be happy, not dwell on him.”
“I have every right to dwell on him!” she shouted defensively, the earth trembling around them because of her outburst. Toph had impressive control over her element and her emotions, but when the topic of the one she lost came up, they were not as malleable as she once made them out to be. “You can’t tell me that I can’t dwell when you have no idea what I’m going through.”
Zuko sighed, reaching for her hand, which she reluctantly let him take. He said, “I may not fully grasp it, but I understand. I’ve loved and lost, too, Toph. And when I’ve lost, I’ve been angry. I mean, you know this—you’ve experienced it. But I’ve found that I’ve reaped greater benefits when I love. Keep that in mind because you and I both know that he thought this way, too.”
Toph shut her eyes against the memory, finding all the validity in it. Moving on did not mean forgetting. She knew that now. She knew that she would always love him and she knew that he would always, always own a part of her no matter who or what came in and left her life. And she knew that there was more than enough space for another love. One that was just as strong and powerful, but also perfectly unlike the one she’d experienced previously.
Love that made her happy. Love that made her feel whole again, without a gaping void to fill.
There would always be that void, the one that only the one she lost would fill, but Kanto was there. And he loved her.
She loved him, too, she finally accepted.
So she leaned her forehead onto her lost love’s headstone, tears streaming down her face, and swore to him that she would live. For him, for Kanto, for their baby.
For herself.
Toph had never felt the wind hit her so strongly or the sun shine so brightly.
one reality
The affection Toph felt for her daughter was something she had never before experienced. In some ways, the amount of love she harbored for Lin scared her sometimes, mainly because she finally understood the reason behind her parents’ fierce need to protect her and keep her to themselves.
But, Oma and Shu, if Toph thought that she knew love, she was sorely mistaken because she hadn’t known it—properly known it—until Lin came into her life.
Of course, the love she bore for her family, for the one she lost, for Kanto… those were all different kinds of love and in no way unreal or invalidated or any less important or influential, but her love for Lin was inexplicable. It was pure and unwavering and unconditional from the very moment Toph felt the first flutters of Lin’s movements in her womb to the second she was born and beyond.
There was still fear. Fear of failing, fear of hurting her, fear of not being a good enough mother. But any doubts or dread were muted when Lin would nuzzle Toph’s neck or hold a finger in her tiny hand. Toph came to realize that the fear was worth it. It was oh, so worth it.
It helped that she had someone with whom to share her reservations.
Through it all, she had Kanto. Every single bit of it, from the moment she decided to let him in, from the moment she allowed herself to live again.
They found each other the night Lin came into the world, Toph at work and insisting that she could manage to get through taped case briefings that she needed to catch up on while in her thirty-ninth week of pregnancy. She would never forget how very startled Kanto was to see her waddling the halls of the precinct that evening; his heartbeat skyrocketed, pounding at a rate she never thought possible. It would’ve made her laugh had she not been so adamant about not speaking with him.
But at that very moment, when he almost had some kind of cardiac episode in the middle of the first-floor corridor, amniotic fluid flooded the halls. It took Kanto no time to rush over to her and come to her aid, despite her not wanting nor asking for it; in fact, she pushed him away in the middle of a very uncomfortable, very painful contraction to make her point. The man still didn’t think it wise to scram.
And he still hadn’t. The fool had stayed.
Toph couldn’t have been gladder.
And an entire year later, she found herself just as glad. Happy, even, for the first time in too long.
She never thought she would find happiness again after she lost him, but every day, she finds it in her daughter and in Kanto and in her friends and family.
Every day, she awoke in Kanto’s arms, to the sound of his thundering snores to which she had to become accustomed, and to the sound of her daughter’s cries of hunger or solitude. And frankly, she couldn’t imagine a better way to wake up, especially following what she’d gone through previously.
And even on bad days, she could depend on her family to bring her what she needed. Daily, Toph watched her husband and daughter interact through the warm ground of their backyard or the cold stone in their home, and she found herself believing Kanto’s promise of more.