Work Text:
“I have a bad feeling.”
Jiahao makes a face at him, an expression that Kanto has seen before that’s easily a cross between annoyed and bored. Toph had given him the same look when he told her the same in the morning. “You have a bad feeling,” Jiahao echoed.
Kanto nods, chewing at the cap of his pen, anxiety pooling in his gut as he tried to put into words what he was trying to tell his best friend. He just—he woke up with this horrible, horrible weight on his chest that felt akin to an elephant putting all its weight on him, and this inkling that something was meant to go wrong.
“What am I supposed to do with this information?”
“Nothing, I just—” He grunts then runs a hand down his face. “You know when you just know something’s going to go wrong, but you don’t really know that what you think is what you know?”
With a confused brow up in his hairline, Jiahao shakes his head incredulously. “What?”
Unreasonably, Kanto lets out a long groan, hating that his best friend in the entire world doesn’t understand what he’s trying to say. “You know—it’s fine. It’s nothing. I’m just—I’m probably not—I’m being dramatic.”
“I agree with that,” Jiahao tells him with a teasing look on his face. “You always are anyway, so it’s not the most out-of-this-world assumption.”
“I hate you.”
Jiahao grins. “You don’t, but nice try. Seriously, man—relax. It’s probably got something to do with these petty thefts. I know I’ve been a little unsettled because of it. I really just don’t get how they can pull off such horrible plans and get away with it.”
“You’re probably right, yeah,” Kanto nods, distracted, skimming the paperwork in front of him. “Okay, yeah, uh—let me get back to this then.”
His best friend nods, approaching the door. “Let me know if you have any other bad feelings I should know about, alright?”
Kanto flings an unopened bag of fire flakes at him, which he catches easily and promptly opens with a smile. “Thanks for the grub. Catch you later.”
Still feeling unsettled, Kanto releases the pen he’s holding and slumps back into his chair. Maybe Jiahao is right and he’s just being dramatic. He’d woken up with such a horrible tightness in his chest and this very present sense of anxiety that he hasn’t felt since his parents died. He was immediately uneasy and he buried his face into Toph’s neck. She was still soundly sleeping on her side with her back to him, so he was easily able to stretch his arm over her large belly and feel a bit calmer than he had been seconds ago.
“You okay?” Toph asked raspily.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said apologetically.
“No. I’ve been up for a while. Do you know how loudly you snore?”
He lifted his head up. “I do not—”
“You do, face it,” she told him. “But that wasn’t the question. Are you okay?”
At her question, he released a long sigh and turned on his back. “I have a feeling,” he told her.
“You have… a feeling.”
“A bad feeling.”
Her confusion was palpable as she made an effort to sit up and faced him with a cross between befuddlement, tedium, and annoyance in her expression. “About what?”
“I don’t know—it’s just there.”
Toph sighed and sat up, getting him to do the same. She held his hands in hers and said, “I’m sure it’s nothing, okay? Now, get over it and get ready for work because who else is going to do my job almost as well as I do?”
And that was that. He took what she said to heart, but he still feels unsettled, as if something’s going to happen, as if something is going to go wrong. Still, he manages to get through his morning, but when he’s finally able to get up and go out for lunch, he’s not feeling any better.
When he leaves his office and heads for the exit of the precinct, Kanto’s face suddenly lights up at the sight of his pregnant girlfriend. “Hey! Why—what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be resting.”
“Eh.” She waves him off dismissively, accepting the kiss he lands on her cheek. “Resting, schmesting. I got bored.”
“So you came to visit me. I get it; I would visit me too if I were in your position.”
Toph rolls her eyes at him and pushes his hands away from her playfully. “As sweet as that would make me seem, I’m actually here to check in on a few things before I get too swollen to move. Or more swollen, at least.”
“Oh,” he says. “Well, are you—can we get lunch at least? Whenever you’re done?”
“Let’s go now,” she tells him, nodding over to the door. “I was hoping to catch you, anyway.”
Kanto scoffs as they walk out. “And you say you didn’t come to visit me.”
“Oh, shut up.”
They spend his entire lunch hour together, talking and slurping down Narook’s best noodles, talking about the baby and their day so far. He almost forgets about his bad feeling until Toph brings it up to ask him. He only tells her that it’s fine and that he’s sure it’s nothing as he pays the meal bill and they head back to the station.
Before parting, Kanto presses a sweet kiss on Toph’s cheek but she doesn’t let him leave until she pulls him down to plant her lips against his briefly with a promise of catching up with him in the evening.
Kanto smiles as he watches her leave and disappear into the staircase that leads to the armory, and he succinctly reflects on how fortunate he is that she had entered his life. He loves her so much, and sometimes, he still thinks that their coming together was not entirely real. But it is, and he’s so damn lucky for it.
A familiar warmth spreads across his chest as he turns on his heel dopily and heads in the direction of his office. He’s got a huge smile on his face and not even a moment after he sits to continue the paperwork he had abandoned, an incomprehensibly loud boom and the sensation of the building shaking sends him flying out of his chair. After a second or two, Kanto springs to his feet from the ground, listening and waiting as he urgently tries to get his head around what just happened.
He has a visceral feeling that there must have been an explosion. Well, it was very obviously an explosion of some sort, but how? Who? People are rushing by his office when he opens the door to survey the corridor, which is full of broken glass and other debris. The station is in total disarray.
It takes him a minute, but he stumbles out of his office, trying to see through the smoke and rising dust when he realizes that most of the damage appears to be coming from the floor below. The armory.
That’s where Toph was going to be for the rest of the afternoon.
His heart drops into his stomach and he shakes himself off before sprinting in that direction. He sees a few of his colleagues on the ground and helps some of them to their feet, commanding them to contact healers if they’re able to before continuing his off-kilter sprint to his girlfriend. The staircase down to the armory is so close but seems so far away at this moment, but when he finally reaches the armory, he finds himself coughing and sputtering at all the smoke and ashes rising out of the room.
The door is blown off, pieces of it hanging on the hinges, and as soon as he enters, his eyes are frantically searching for Toph amid the debris. Not long after he steps in, he finds her pinned beneath fragments of a shelf that housed special weaponry shipped over from the Fire Nation.
Without pause, Kanto darts forward to get to her. He ignores the small flames around the room and he pulls his shirt up to his nose to keep himself from coughing.
That’s when he sees the blood.
Kanto tries not to think about it as he moves away portions of the broken desk off of his girlfriend. She’s two weeks out from giving birth, and he’s trying to not think of the worst possible scenario. She’s unconscious and it isn’t until he feels for her pulse and sees that she’s breathing that he calms down a fraction, but he’s screaming at the top of his lungs for help from someone. Anyone.
She has to be okay, he thinks, they have to be okay—her and their baby. If they aren’t, he doesn’t know what he’d do with himself.
Warm tears roll down his face as he finally frees Toph from the mess of wood and metal that covered her bottom half. He continues to yell for help and after his throat feels entirely raw, Kanto registers that Jiahao is rushing into the armory with Katara on his tail. Immediately, the slightest bit of relief washes over him.
Jiahao pulls Kanto away from Toph with much difficulty as Kanto isn’t making it easy for him and holds him back as Katara begins to work on her. Several healers enter after, a stretcher in tow. They transfer her onto it as Katara continues to heal her, and they take her away.
Kanto’s best friend is talking to him, saying something or another, but he sounds so far away because all Kanto can think of is his baby and Toph and whether or not they’ll be okay. He can’t imagine his life without Toph, and since they found out about her pregnancy, he can’t think about their lives without their child in it.
“I had a bad feeling.” Kanto sobs into Jiahao’s shirt, interrupting whatever he was saying. “I knew it.”
Kanto balls his hands into fists to keep himself from shaking as he sits in the waiting room, his leg bouncing. Toph was taken in for healing over an hour ago. Hot tears are still cascading down his cheeks out of his own control, and Jiahao sits dutifully at his side after having filled him in on the happenings at the precinct.
“Someone didn’t store the blasting jelly correctly,” he’d told Kanto with a dry scoff. “Why we even stored blasting jelly down there anymore beats the heck out of me, but that’s all it was. No attacks, okay? No one’s after her.”
The news did very little to calm him down, however. He’d been worried—albeit partially—that someone had planted something at the station to get Toph or someone there. But now that that isn’t the case, all he can focus on is the fact that it’s been over an hour and there has been no news.
As if reading his mind, Jiahao squeezes Kanto’s shoulder and says, “No news is good news, right? That’s what we always say.”
Kanto nods absently, trying to believe this now more than ever.
But he doesn’t have to for long because Katara finally emerges from the room, causing Kanto to scramble to his feet.
“Is she—”
“She’s fine,” Katara tells him. She looks exhausted, likely because she just finished doing all her best work on her best friend. “And we got her to her room. She’s stable, but she’s resting now. I managed to tell her everything that happened before she dozed off again. She was pierced by some metal from the desk. There was a lot of bleeding and her body was in distress, so we had to deliver the baby.”
Kanto’s breath catches in his throat and his legs very nearly give out, but Katara grabs his hand and squeezes, a small, tired smile on her face. “Your baby girl is fine, too. Only twelve days early—she’s fully developed, just had to vacate earlier than expected. Sleeping soundly next to Mama. She’s good, okay? They both are. You can go see them whenever you’re ready.”
At this, Kanto releases a shuddering sigh and pulls on Katara’s hand, bringing her against his chest in a tight embrace. His eyes pool with tears as he thanks her and he feels her exhale her reply: “No need. Now, go, meet your baby girl.”
He nods against her shoulder before releasing her and practically sprinting into the private hospital room Katara points him toward. He enters the room quietly to find Toph asleep with their baby girl likewise in dreamland inside a small hospital-issued bassinet. His breath catches in his throat at the sight of their daughter, so the first thing he does is walk up to her and lift her up to his chest.
“I didn’t know you were going to be a little girl,” he whispers into her perfect head. “But your mama and I thought in advance, and you’re our little Lin. And I’m so happy that you are, baobei. I’m so happy you’re here and I love you so much.”
For a while, he sits with his daughter and keeps his eye on Toph, not wanting to wake her after he presses a quick kiss on her forehead. She’s alive, she’s okay, and they have Lin. He feels light, knowing that even after disaster struck, things settled down in the end.
After about an hour, Kanto catches Toph stirring out of the corner of his eye, so he stands up, his baby girl still sleeping soundly in his arms.
Toph inhales and releases a pained grunt as her eyes flutter open. “Hotshot.”
“Hey, Beifong,” he says with relief and simultaneous worry. His hand reaches for hers and squeezes. She feels cold and for a moment, it scares him. His voice is thick with emotion when he tells her, “You scared the living shit out of me, you know that?”
“I have to keep things interesting, or what else is there to look forward to?”
Kanto releases a wet laugh and leans down to kiss Toph gently on her lips. “For starters, we’ve got this little one to rave about until we’re bored.”
Almost as if she was responding to him, Lin lets out a coo that makes Kanto want to melt. Toph smiles at the sound, her weary eyes watering a bit as she rests her hand on her still-swollen belly. “So that was real. She’s—she’s real.”
He rests Lin on Toph’s chest and she lets out a choked laugh, her tears streaming down her face. “She’s real,” he tells her, marveling at the sight before him. “You’re both okay, I—I could’ve lost you both today.”
“But you didn’t,” Toph replies, leaning her face into his hand when he caresses her cheek. She grunts slightly at whatever pain ails her. “Although, I should be keener to listen to your bad feelings.”
With a chuckle, Kanto sits on the corner of her bed and rests his forehead against hers, their baby between them. “I never want to have one of those again.”
“Well, it’s not all bad. We got this little badgermole out of it after all, huh?”
He supposes that she’s right. If there’s anything to be thankful for is that Toph is okay and that they got Lin out of all of this. He could’ve done without the near-deaths but she’s right.
“I love you,” he tells her suddenly. “I love both of you, so please never scare me like that again.”
Toph shoots him a tired smile. “I will do my best, Hotshot.”
With a light shake of his head, he gently transfers Lin over to her bassinet and carefully lays beside Toph. “No—I—I don’t think you understand. I’ve never been so scared in my life. The thought that I was so close to losing you and Lin and—”
“Hey, no.” She takes his hand and brings it to her lips, kissing his knuckles one by one. “That’s not going to happen. Not if I can help it.”
“But—”
Her fingers come up to his mouth. “I love you. And I’m going to stick around for as long as I can. You can’t get rid of me no matter how many bad feelings you get, you got it?”
Like a placated child, he nods, leaning down to kiss her softly. Her words to him bounce around in his head and all he can think of is that she damn well better because he doesn’t know if he can live without her.