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Her adventure with Zuko wasn’t supposed to take place in a kitchen. It wasn’t supposed to be simply dragging Zuko a few doors down the hall from his annoyingly paper-stuffed room, and it definitely wasn’t supposed to be so devoid of danger. The worst that they’d suffered were a pair of burnt tongues when they refused to wait until the cookies had cooled, and the most shocking thing had been when Zuko’s sleeve ended up dipped and dyed from the matcha, or so he’d said between gripes about angry launderers. Her last try at a life-changing adventure had been too full of depressing anecdotes—of course, Aang’s disappearance wasn’t ideal either—but she had expected better the second time around.
Now, by the time Toph remembered to have any kind of heart-to-heart, they were already done and had relegated themselves to the floor, the only clean surface left in the previously spotless kitchen. But she was nothing if not stubborn.
“My parents tried to have me kidnapped,” she said, flopping down and feeling the back of her head hit Zuko, the layers of Fire Lord robes pillowing over his bony shoulder. She crunched on one of their cookies, the smoky taste and toughness giving it a distinctness that marked it as a flavor of their failure.
Zuko chuckled, the usual dry and wry laugh that she and the others had spent the last few days of the war getting used to. “My father sicced my sister on me. Multiple times.”
“Oh, the woes of rich kids.” Chewing without care for her manners, sitting in the middle of the stickiest kitchen in the Caldera with the mess of her idea coating every surface, rubbing elbows with someone from the Fire Nation, much less their leader; her parents would have been scandalized. Her mother would have probably fainted. And yet, her mother had been the reason she wanted to make the cookies in the first place.
“These were the only thing my mother taught me how to make,” she added, the words losing the nonchalant edge she’d been holding onto. Why the memory had surfaced, along with the craving to bake, was a thorn she didn’t know how to remove without drawing blood. “They said everything else was too complicated for me. Like earthbending, they couldn’t figure out how to teach it differently than their stupid, traditional methods.”
“They could never figure out how to teach me either.” His voice was hesitant, like he’d never admitted it out loud to anyone before. “Too slow or too stupid. Or sometimes, too weak.”
“See, the solution to that is to have an underground firebending competition and prove you’re the best by winning. Trust me, it works.”
“Not all of us are the best benders in their element; Azula would be the one to win anything like that immediately.”
“That’s assuming she could even find that underground fighting ring. I’d bet you’d wipe the floor before she even got signed up… Do you ever miss her?” Her question was about as soft as Toph ever let herself get. Sure, sticks and stones break bones, but she’d been taught how much words could hurt by her own parents. She didn’t have a sibling, but she imagined it would hurt about the same.
Zuko hummed, the grating crumble of a cookie coming from behind her as he chewed his way through one of their more charred samples. “Yeah, as weird as that is.”
“Yeah, me too.” And she knew he understood what, and who, she meant without having to say more. After a few seconds of silence, she snapped, “Don’t rub it!”
Shifting her bare heel just enough to raise a warning spike of earth underneath him, she took the yelp to mean that she didn’t have to repeat it, though it didn’t stop her from checking with her feet that he really had let his hand fall from his chest. “Katara said you can’t aggravate it for a good while and you know: what the Sugar Queen says, goes—unless she’s harping on something fun and then screw whatever her complaints are.”
“When did you get so protective of Katara’s mama rhino-bear instincts?”
“When she healed my feet after you burned them.”
“Ow. Somehow that hurts more than Azula’s burn.”
Toph smirked, deciding against elbowing him in the side. Her physical affection had a limit of one nugget of tough love per five minutes.
“Even the worst mole will reach the surface some day.”
She took Zuko’s silence to be a sign that her wisdom was working, as it always did, eventually. Sometimes Toph forgot how quiet Zuko could get. Surrounded by people like Sokka, Katara, and even Aang, it was easy to lose him in the noise like he somehow blended into the pauses—when he wasn’t being actively riled.
“That sounds like something Uncle would say,” Zuko finally muttered.
“You flatter me, Smoky, I didn’t know you had it in you!” Gnawing on the end of one of the cookies’ more burned sides, she continued, “He was actually the first adult to take me seriously in a long time. And he said we were alike.”
She remembered the anger and irritation that had filled her then, the way Katara had come so close to feeling like her parents, smothering and belittling, and yet all Iroh had needed was a few words to convince her defenses to crumble. He’d clearly been an old-hand at it by then, but considering who he had to practice with, she couldn’t say she was surprised.
“Yeah, I just said that.” Zuko’s raspy voice jarred her back to the present.
“No, I mean you and me. He said it was because of wanting to do everything on our own. After only knowing me for the length of time it takes to make tea.”
“Oh.” Zuko moved behind her to scratch at his warped ear, warming her back in the process. It was like standing on heated tiles, if you stood still your feet got used to it, but as soon as you started walking, the heat would come back with each step. It was far nicer than trying to warm herself by a fire she couldn’t see and avoid. “You dragged me down here though, so is that still true?”
“Hey! I needed a guide to your kitchen and you needed a break—”
“You tore a hole in my wall, half my papers are out on the lawn now!”
“With a little paperweight pebble for each, I told you. You can collect them in the afternoon, if it’s not done for you.”
The nonsensical grumbling behind her was all the proof she needed that he’d come around to seeing things her way, which was to say, the papers were meaningless and unreadable anyway. If they went back to carving things in rock, that would be a different matter entirely.
“Besides, you still owed me a life-changing trip, remember? You kind of put sand in my porridge last time.”
“Are you going to keep hounding me about that trip forever? What if you’re fine the way you are?” he asked with an exasperated sigh.
“I might be the closest thing to perfect, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be improved! You don’t stop polishing a stone just cause it looks shiny.”
“Now you’re trying too hard, I think I prefer elbower-Toph to this weirdly wise Toph.”
“Too bad you don’t get a choice. I think dragging you places does you good, so don’t get comfortable in that nice room of yours.” She reached for another cookie, passing him one over her shoulder.
“Is it still nice with an extra hole added?”
“That just gives it character. I started practicing in Ba Sing Se so my remodeling skills have come a long way since then. Just wait ‘til I’m through with this place.”
“If I go on these trips with you, will you at least let me pick what walls you take out?”
“You have a preference?” She could remember how saturated the Fire Lord’s presence had been in the palace when they first got here and for all that Zuko had started to put things in order, there wasn’t enough of him to fit the same space as his father. Something Toph would take great pleasure in rectifying, and destroying.
“I’m sure Uncle would have a few ideas to add.” The scrape of his crown against the wall came during his pause. “I think he’d like some of these cookies too.”
“Are you basing this off the fact that they have tea in them?”
“That’s all it takes, right?”
She snorted. “Zuko, your tea skills still have a long way to go. So does our baking.”
“Something for the next time then.”