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Toph had been sneaking out of the Beifong estate for years, and at twenty, she had it down to an art.
Her father knew none of it, of course. As far as Lao Beifong was concerned, his daughter spent her nights safely tucked away in her rooms, with a guard posted outside to make sure she stayed there. He had hired the man last year, saying something about extra protection and a household that could never be too careful. Toph had rolled her eyes at her father’s antics.
Still, there was something interesting about the new guard. He never spoke. According to her father, the man had only said one thing on the day he arrived, and it was to introduce himself as the Blue Spirit. The name came from the blue porcelain mask he wore. Toph thought it sounded tacky, though she couldn’t have said much because she didn't know what blue even looked like, and she didn’t particularly care. So the new guard had never been seen without his mask, and he had never said another word.
Great, Toph had thought at the time. A creep. Her father really knew how to keep the household festive.
The creep, as Toph had decided to call him, followed her around the estate like a shadow. He never stood too close. In fact, he always kept exactly twelve paces behind her. Toph had counted. She had tested it, too, stopping without warning in the middle of hallways and garden paths, and every single time, his footsteps had stopped at the same distance. Twelve paces, no more and no less. He was always there, hovering and watching, with his two swords tucked into the sheaths at his waist.
She had to admit, though, that she appreciated the silence. Her previous guards had never stopped fussing. They would rush over at the smallest stumble to ask if she was alright, as if she couldn’t take down every one of them with a flick of her finger. The Blue Spirit wasn’t like that. He was just there, silently making sure she was safe.
Except, in Toph’s opinion, he wasn’t very good at his job. Because whenever she slipped out at night, he never seemed to notice.
Tonight had been one of those nights.
The Earth Rumble arena was packed and louder than usual, and the Blind Bandit was in fine form. She had already sent two challengers flying out of the ring by the time the third one stepped up. The moment he did, the crowd went strangely quiet. Toph heard murmurs rippling through the stands, something about her opponent wearing red. She didn’t pay it much mind. She simply stomped her foot to read him through the ground, and found him already sprinting toward her. There was something off about the way he moved. It was light and quick, nothing like the heavy, rooted stance of an earthbender.
Then the heat hit her.
A burst of fire roared toward her, and the crowd screamed. Toph threw herself sideways just in time and felt the flames rush past, close enough to singe the ends of her hair. A firebender. In an earthbending tournament. Toph had nothing against Fire Nation fighters entering the ring, but bending a completely different element was cheating. Someone had clearly paid off the organizers. And that someone was about to get his body slammed into the ground, because Toph did not appreciate being cheated. She didn’t give him a second chance though. Toph slammed her foot down, and the ring split open beneath him, throwing him off balance. Before he could recover, a slab of rock shot up and launched him over the edge of the ring and straight into the crowd. The arena erupted. Toph grinned and raised her fists.
Not even a firebender could beat her. Especially not on her turf.
It was only on the walk home, as her feet crunched down the gravel path toward the estate, that she realized her ankle was hurt. She must have twisted it when she dove away from the fire. It wasn’t serious. There was no metallic smell of blood, only a dull ache and a limp she couldn’t hide. She had walked away from far worse. By the time she reached the back garden, she was still feeling pleased with herself. She slipped through the usual gap in the hedge and stepped onto the grass.
Then she stopped altogether.
He was there. He stood at the edge of the lawn near the old oak tree, so still that she wondered how long he had been waiting.
“Oh,” Toph said. “It’s you.”
She started walking again, taking small, careful steps to keep her weight off her ankle. He said nothing, of course. But he didn’t step aside to let her pass, either. Toph frowned and tilted her head. Through the ground, she felt him move, and then he began walking toward her.
Eleven paces. Ten. Nine.
Toph’s frown deepened. In a whole year, he had never once come closer than twelve.
“Look, creep,” she started, then caught herself. “I mean, guard. I was just bored in my room, so I went for a walk around the estate. And I tripped. Because, well, I’m blind. But there’s really no need to be alarmed—”
She never got to finish. Before she could take another step, the ground beneath her feet disappeared. One of his arms hooked under her knees, and the other wrapped firmly around her back. Suddenly she was off the ground entirely, pressed against his chest.
“Hey!” Toph squirmed. “Put me down! What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer. He only held her tighter and started walking.
She twisted and pushed at his shoulder and kicked her legs, and none of it made any difference. Each time she struggled, his arms tightened around her a little more, firm without ever being rough.
“You just said you tripped, Lady Toph.”
Toph’s breath caught.
His voice was low and raspy, as though it hadn’t been used in a long time. She had spent a whole year assuming he couldn’t speak, or simply wouldn’t. Hearing him now, this close, made her forget to keep fighting. She went still in his arms, too stunned to do anything else. It didn’t help that without the ground beneath her, the world had gone silent and strange. She couldn’t sense the garden or the house anymore. All she could feel was him. The warmth of his body through his clothes, and his heartbeat, right beneath her ear, pounding much harder than it should have been.
The next thing she heard was the creak of a wooden door. It sounded cheap and too loud, nothing like the heavy doors of her family’s house. She had already guessed he was taking her to his guardhouse, and she was proven right when a new smell reached her. It was incense, and underneath it, tea. He carried her inside and lowered her onto something soft. It was a narrow bed, she realized. The mattress felt thin and rough beneath her palms.
The moment her feet touched the stone floor, the room snapped back into focus around her. Toph rounded on him. “What was that?!”
He crouched down in front of her. “You were limping,” he said simply. “I need to make sure you’re alright.”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. He was already moving around the small room, opening drawers and lifting the lids of containers, searching for something. Once he had what he needed, he knelt on the floor in front of her again. This time, he asked.
“May I see your ankle?”
Toph hesitated. Then she nodded and moved her foot forward slightly.
He took it slowly, his hand cupping her heel. With his other hand, he rolled the hem of her loose pants up just enough to reach the injury. When his fingertips touched the bare skin of her ankle, a shiver ran straight up her spine. Toph held very still. He traced along her foot with careful pressure, feeling for the swelling, for the exact place where it hurt the most. Then he pressed a cold, damp cloth against her ankle, and she sucked in a breath.
“It’s not like you to get hurt at Earth Rumble, Lady Toph,” he said.
Toph’s eyes flew wide. If he hadn’t been holding her foot, she would have shot straight up off the bed.
“You—” she started, far too loudly. She remembered herself just in time and dropped her voice to a furious hiss. As far as the rest of the household knew, sweet, blind Toph was sound asleep in her bed, not sitting in a guardhouse with a sprained ankle. “You knew?”
He huffed behind his mask. It sounded almost like a laugh. “Only a fool would call himself a guard and not notice your footsteps at night. You’re not exactly quiet.”
For someone who hadn’t spoken a single word in a year, this man was surprisingly sassy. Toph opened her mouth, ready to fire something back at him.
But before she could, the air in the room shifted.
His hands went still on her ankle. He didn’t move, and didn’t let go. Toph couldn’t see him, but she didn’t need to. Through the floor, she felt his weight lean toward her. She felt his heartbeat change, as though something in him had hardened. She knew, without any doubt at all, that behind that mask he was looking straight at her.
When he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something dangerous. “Now tell me,” he said. “Who did this to you?”
His thumb pressed gently against the inside of her ankle.
“I’ll kill him.”
Toph’s eyes widened for the second time in as many minutes. This creep was turning out to be full of surprises.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” She threw her hands up between them, as if she could calm him down by sheer force. “There’s no need for that!”
The damp cloth had slipped a little to the side, and a thin line of cold water was running down toward her toes. Toph could feel him waiting through the stone floor. He was simply crouched there in front of her, patiently waiting for her to explain why he shouldn’t go after whoever had sprained her ankle. She let out a long sigh and dropped her hands back into her lap. “Nobody hurt me,” she said. “I sprained it myself. I was dodging my opponent and landed badly.” She wrinkled her nose at the memory. “Which was annoying, honestly. He was a firebender.”
The change in him was sudden. Before she could make sense of it, his hands were moving. They slid up from her ankle to the back of her calf, pressing lightly through the thin fabric of her pants, then back down again. He turned her foot to one side, then the other, his thumbs sweeping over her skin in quick, searching strokes.
“A firebender?” His voice had risen sharply. He sounded alarmed. “Did you get burned? Anywhere? Your arms, your face? Did he touch you?”
Toph sat there and let him check, too stunned to stop him.
For an entire year, this man had been nothing more than footsteps to her. She had memorized the sound of him. He walked lightly for someone with his build. And he always, always stopped twelve paces behind her. Tonight, he hadn’t bothered with any of them. He never cleared his throat or hummed or muttered under his breath. And now, in the space of one night, he had said more words to her than in all those months combined. He wasn’t even finished.
A laugh slipped out of her. It was small at first, then grew until she had to press the back of her hand against her mouth to keep it quiet. “Relax,” she managed between laughs. “He barely singed the ends of my hair.” She tilted her head in his direction, still grinning.
“What’s gotten into you, anyway? Since when do you talk this much? Did my father start paying you extra for it?”
His hands stopped moving on her leg. Slowly, they drew back to her ankle and settled there again. The quiet came back into the room once more. For a moment, she thought she had pushed him back into it for good. Then he spoke, his voice soft and muffled behind the mask.
“I… find it hard to stay silent when I’m worried about you.”
Toph’s grin slipped off her face.
Warmth crept up her throat and spread into her cheeks. She was suddenly, painfully aware of everything around her. Most of all, she was aware of the heat of his hands on her ankle. She could not stop thinking about it, no matter how hard she tried. She didn’t know what to do with what he had just said. People didn’t say things like that to her. She turned her face away toward the wall. It was pointless, she knew. He could probably see the color on her cheeks anyway. But it made her feel a little less exposed.
“Well,” she muttered at the wall, “I’m fine. So you don’t need to be so dramatic about it.”
He didn’t argue with her. Instead, she heard him reach for the basin. The water sloshed as he dipped the cloth in again and wrung it out, and the drops pattered back into the bowl one by one. Then the cold pressed against her ankle once more, and this time he held it there without moving. The ache beneath it began to dull, little by little, under the steady chill.
“Why didn’t you stop me?” she asked finally. “If you knew all along that I was sneaking out to Earth Rumble.” She turned her head back toward him. “Isn’t that your whole job? Keeping me locked away nice and safe?”
He took his time with the answer. She heard him set the basin down a little further away, the bottom of it scraping softly against the floor. When he finally spoke, his voice was calm. “My job is to make sure you don’t get hurt,” he said. “And as far as I’ve seen, you don’t get hurt at Earth Rumble.” He paused. “It’s the opposite, actually. You always come back home safe and happy. Happier than I’ve ever seen you anywhere else.”
His thumb moved once against the inside of her ankle, a small, absent motion, and stopped. “But tonight, watching you walk home limping,” he paused to breathe, “I realized I’d made a terrible mistake.”
He wasn’t finished, though. After a moment, he added, in the most serious voice she had heard from him yet, “So it would be my honor if you let me kill him.”
The laugh burst out of her. “Whoa! Spirits, please, enough with the killing!” She clapped both hands over her mouth, her shoulders shaking as she tried to contain herself. It was no use. Every time she thought she had finally gotten herself under control, she remembered the utterly solemn way he’d said it would be an honor to kill someone over an accidentally sprained ankle, and she’d dissolve into laughter all over again. She should have found it alarming, she supposed. Any sensible person would. But somehow she couldn’t. There was something oddly endearing about a man who offered to commit murder in the same polite tone other people used to offer a cup of tea.
They sat in silence for a while after that. It was a different sort of silence than before. It felt lighter and comfortable. He kept the cold cloth pressed to her ankle and changed it whenever it grew warm. Eventually, the throbbing in her ankle eased. Toph pushed herself up from the bed. She tested her weight on her foot slowly, pressing down into the cool floor. It still hurt, but only a little. She took a step toward the door, then another. Her gait was uneven, but it was far better than before.
Behind her, she felt him rise to his feet. She felt him take one step after her, then another, staying close enough to catch her if she stumbled. Toph counted without meaning to.
Two paces. He was barely two paces behind her.
“I can get back on my own,” she said before he could reach for her. Then she added, “Thanks, though.”
She stopped at the doorway and turned her head slightly over her shoulder. “You should talk more,” she said. Then she reconsidered. “Or at least, we should talk more.” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “You’re weird, you know. I like that.”
She didn’t wait to hear what he would say. She stepped out into the garden and limped slowly across the damp grass toward the house, feeling her way home through the soles of her feet.
She couldn’t have seen it, of course. But behind the blue porcelain mask, the Blue Spirit was smiling.
The next morning, the whole household was buzzing with gossip.
Toph heard all of it from the breakfast table. Two of the maids were whispering near the kitchen door, not nearly as quietly as they believed. Their voices kept rising with excitement before dropping again to a hush. Apparently, the firebender who had shown up at Earth Rumble the night before had been found at dawn, hanging upside down from the arena’s painted sign. His shirt had been pulled up and tied over his head. He was alive and entirely unharmed. He had simply been humiliated in front of everyone in Gaoling.
Slowly, Toph tilted her head toward the corner of the dining room. She didn't need to turn around. Through the floor, she could already feel him standing behind her, as still and silent as he always was. But something was different this morning. She didn't even have to try to count the distance. Her feet did it for her.
Toph lifted her cup to hide her grin.
Eight paces.