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Toph stands by her desk with her arms crossed and her brows drawn together, wondering exactly what is on her desk and why.
For weeks, she’s been getting these anonymous gifts and letters, and although she’s well aware of who they’re coming from, the reason behind the gesture remains unclear.
The gifts have Sokka written all over them. They’re cheesy and thoughtful and full of jokes that only the two of them would understand. And every time she asks him about it during their weekly radio calls, he simply glazes over the topic and moves on—classic voluntary aversion tactics. She should know; she’s used them on him.
If she wasn’t so uncharacteristically endeared—or in love with the idiot—she might have been annoyed by the whole thing.
But right now, she’s got her head cocked to the side, trying to figure out what exactly the abomination— because there truly is no other word for it—set on her desk is.
She’d just gone for her lunch break to grab her usual takeaway noodles from Narook’s and a couple of cold teas for herself—one for the lunch and one for later—and when she returned, she found her secretary standing up to meet her.
Quickly, she informed Toph of the fact that she’d set another package on her desk with a note that read I know you’re not into the real thing but I got you a thing to make up for your hatred of romance.
And ever since, she’s been trying to decipher what exactly this thing on her desk is. Her noodles are probably cold.
There’s a knock on her door that interrupts her thoughts, but she doesn’t even get the chance to tell the interloper to come in before he barges into her office.
“Hey—” Kanto says before stopping in his tracks beside her. “What is that—?”
“That’s precisely what I’m trying to figure out.”
Her friend and deputy chief takes a few tentative steps toward her desk to pick up the thing they’re both confused about. His head cocks. “Is it a statue?”
She shrugs. “I have no clue.”
“It’s certainly… something,” he says, setting the whatever-it-is back on her desk, then turns to face her with a stupid grin on his face. “Is this from your not-so-secret admirer?”
Despite herself, Toph finds that she’s holding back her own smile. “That would be my guess, yeah.”
“And he’s supposed to be back tonight, right?”
Toph nods.
A beat of silence, then he pokes her cheek. “Do you need me to take Lin? I can take Lin. I should take Lin.”
She’s about to shoot him down but the idea tempts her. Sokka is scheduled to dock tonight and the truth is that she really could use the alone time with him. It’s been months and she misses the shit out of him. And as much as she wants to have Lin to herself tonight, she doesn’t really have the appetite to scar her for the rest of her life.
Eventually, Toph circles back around her desk and plops down on her chair. “I’ll take you up on that, actually. But I want her back by noon tomorrow, Hotshot. Don’t be slick.”
“She likes my place! I can’t just tell her she has to leave! You can’t say no to someone like Lin—she’ll make you feel like you’ve kidnapped her entire family for ransom with one look if you do her wrong.”
“I wouldn’t know, so I’m unaffected.”
“That joke has not been funny since the first time you said it.” His voice has a hint of humor despite his words.
She smirks at him. “Yet you laugh every time.”
“Whatever,” he replies laughingly as he knocks on her desk twice before approaching her office door. “I’ll bring Lin by before I take her home.”
“You’d better.”
Her and Kanto’s co-parenting situation is simple, so long as there’s transparency and complete honesty between them. She only asks that whenever he has her for the week that he makes sure to bring her around to say goodbye, and he asks for the same from her.
And even if things weren’t as simple as they are, Toph would’ve made sure that they were because this is more than whatever issues she and Kanto could ever have. It’s about Lin. It would always be about Lin.
Thankfully, though, Kanto and Toph were friends when they slept together four years ago and they’re still friends now. Things just… didn’t work out between them the way they wanted them to.
She prefers having him as a friend anyway—he’s a damn good one.
Kanto leaves after that, leaving Toph to her thoughts, her work, and the thing that Sokka sent her. For a while, she tries to focus on her final few duties but the gift is just watching her work and she can’t deal with it.
Deciding that leaving work a couple of hours early on a Friday won’t do her too much damage, Toph pushes away from her desk, grabs her belongings and her Thing, and heads out.
“Go home, Aiko,” Toph tells her secretary. “‘Cause I sure am.”
“Chief?”
“I’ll tell Kanto to keep an eye on our desks in case anything huge happens. It’s a dead day, anyway.”
Aiko stands up with her hands clasped with each other. “Yes, Chief. Have a great night.”
Kanto is somehow not surprised by Toph’s news of her early departure and tells her that she should stop by Lin’s daycare facility now rather than later. She agrees and calls his idea “intelligent for once” before he sends a pen flying at her, which she expertly avoids with a teasing smile on her face.
It takes her no time to get to Lin’s daycare, where she’s playing around with some musical instruments her caretakers provide to all the kids. Her daughter seems to be quite intent on beating her toy cymbals to a pulp as she’s crashing them together when Toph is escorted into the playroom.
The first thing Toph hears is the crashing of the cymbals on the ground and the word “Mama!” come out of her daughter’s mouth before Lin plows right into her legs.
Toph laughs before crouching down to properly embrace her daughter. Lin’s arms come around her mother’s neck and she nuzzles her face between her face and shoulder. “Hi, Mama.”
“Hi, baby girl,” Toph replies, giving her a kiss. “How was your day?”
“Good, Mama. I play today!”
“You did? And did you behave?”
Lin giggles and shakes her head. “No.”
Toph grins and gives her another peck on the cheek. “Good girl.” When she stands, she picks her up and props Lin on her hip. “I need to tell you something.”
“Hmm. What, Mama?”
“Baba’s going to be picking you up and taking you to his place today, so I just wanted to say goodbye to my favorite girl for the night.”
Lin isn’t disappointed in this news as she lets out a happy gasp. “Baba?”
“Mhm. He’ll be here soon, okay? So try to behave for Miss Ji in the meantime.”
She nods excitedly. “Yes, Mama. I try, I try.”
Toph sticks around for another half hour to play around with Lin before she finally takes off. It makes her happy that Lin wasn’t dejected about not staying the night with her. The fact that she has a good relationship with Kanto means everything, especially after all the work he and Toph put into getting her used to their arrangement.
It smells like rain when she walks out of the daycare facility and she can only hope she can pick up dinner and drinks before she gets home. Something stops her, however, as she crosses the street.
A familiar heartbeat and heavy footsteps catch her attention and she arches a brow amusedly, then decides to continue doing what she’s doing without stopping to give the person following her around any attention.
This lasts a short time, though, because her man isn’t quite the expert at sneaking around people he loves. He’s quite noisy when he wants to be judging by the crack in the sidewalk he trips on and the grunted curses he hisses.
“I know you’re there, Snoozles,” Toph says with a smile on her face as she walks in the direction of the restaurant. “Might as well quit trying to sneak around while you’re ahead and say hi.”
There’s some silence but then she feels his footsteps quicken, and suddenly, his arms are around her waist from behind and his face is nuzzled in her neck.
She laughs at the way his breath tickles her skin and melts into the hold he has on her. He’s warm and he smells a bit like seawater, but she welcomes it because she really fucking missed him.
“Didn’t get you for even a second, huh?”
“Not one.”
Sokka turns her around and takes her face in his hands. There’s a moment where he does nothing and she assumes that he’s looking at her, taking her in the way that she’s brushing his features with her fingers. Then, he leans in and kisses her.
The warmth that pools in her belly the moment his lips touch hers contrasts nicely with the lowering temperatures as she lets herself feel him. His face is full of two days’ worth of scruff, she notes as she cups one hand over his cheek and the other clutches his clothes for dear life.
His fingers dig into her hair and she responds by raising her own hands to undo his hair tie. She weaves her hands into his now-loose hair to pull him closer before pulling back slightly and leaning her forehead against his.
“Miss me much?” she asks him breathlessly.
He kisses the tip of her nose, making her scrunch her face before stepping back. “You have no idea.”
“Eh, I might have a little bit of an idea considering how you almost ravished me in the streets of Republic City just now.”
“Can’t blame me.” Sokka laughs, throwing an arm around her shoulders and dropping a kiss on her head. “It’s been four months without any of this and I couldn’t wait another second.”
Toph chuckles, trying to ignore the stupid fluttering in her chest whenever he says things like this. Then, she tells him, “Now that that’s out of the way, I’m starving and I was on my merry way to get some dinner before I realized I was being stalked.”
“First of all, ouch,” he says, making her snort as they begin to walk in the direction of the restaurant. “Second of all, good thing I’m starving.”
They walk a short distance with Sokka telling her all about his trip, and before they know it, they’re sitting in a corner booth at Kuang’s. It takes her a minute after that for Toph to notice that he doesn’t have any of his possessions other than the umbrella he’s carrying and the sheath that holds his boomerang.
“I dropped everything off at our place after I went to the station,” he tells her.
“You went to the station?”
“Mhm, to look for you, but when I went to your office, Kanto told me where you might be.”
Toph nods as she takes a sip of the house sake. “He’s useful when he wants to be.”
“He actually told me you’d say that and told me to flip you off in the case that you did, but I don’t want you to beat my ass so soon after I returned.”
“Wise man, my Snoozles.”
The dinner they share not too long after that makes her realize how much she missed him exactly. They talk and eat and talk some more, filling each other in on what they missed, on what they were unable to cover on their radio calls and letters. She also realizes how much she longed to hear his voice, to feel his heartbeat, to take his hand whenever she felt like it.
She missed all of him.
When they finally get home, Toph searches her cabinets for something to munch on as Sokka pulls out a bottle of wine for them to drink straight out of.
“When are we picking Lin up tomorrow? I miss her,” he says suddenly, watching her from across the kitchen island as she grabs a container of nuts and walks to the sitting room.
“Kanto said he’d bring her by noon. I’ve got the day off, so maybe we can, I don’t know, hang out together if you’ve got nothing on your agenda…”
“Only you, baby.”
She rolls her eyes at the pet name, causing him to laugh, and sets their snack on the coffee table.
“So a little birdy told me you’ve gotten yourself a secret admirer.” He’s still leaning against the island and he’s got a stupid smirk on his face. “Should I be jealous?”
“Of yourself? I wouldn’t say so.”
Sokka groans. “How long did it take for you to realize it was me?”
“Pretty much after the first gift. The wax seal with the Water Tribe symbol on it was a bit of a giveaway.”
Again, he groans, running his hand down his face this time. Then, he sighs. “It’s the thought that counts, I guess.”
Toph tries holding back her smile with much difficulty as she crosses her arms over her chest beside the couch. “So what was this about, hm? All the gifts and notes and romantic trinkets. That bored without me by your side?”
“It was a way to keep you on your toes.” He shrugs, throwing himself onto her couch. He pats the space next to him so she can join him, which she does. “Letters and radio calls weren’t enough for me.”
“No?”
“Nope, I needed to know you were being mentally stimulated in my absence.”
She nods, biting her cheek to keep herself from smiling too widely. “Mm, right. And me working a job as a police chief, where I investigate things for a living, wouldn’t do precisely that?”
He pretends to think for a moment before pulling her into his chest and kissing the top of her head. “No, not at all. Not the way I do.”
“Ass,” she says laughingly. Then, she presses a kiss to his clavicle and asks, “So, uh, that one gift that was left on my desk today…”
He winces. “Did you not like it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she replies honestly, grabbing her bag and pulling the Thing out. “I have no idea what the hell it is.”
“It’s—it’s supposed to be a stone carving of a moonflower—”
Toph interrupts him with a surprised snort, holding her gift in her hands. “Is that what this is?”
“It— yes. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to be and I worked really hard on it.”
“Oh, that I can tell.” She snorts again and notices that he’s trying to hold back his own laughs. “I really had no idea what this was.”
When he can’t take it anymore, he bursts out laughing and covers his face with both his hands. She can’t help but join him.
“Look,” he says, still laughing, “it was really hard trying to find the right rock and the right materials, and then just carving the thing was a whole other monster.” He takes the gift from her and examines it. “But—but I think it—it at least looks like a flower—”
“It sure doesn’t feel like it.” Toph laughs loudly. “It—I swear it feels like some kind of, I don’t know, weird fan-made figurine of Aang.”
He laughs again until he wheezes and she’s trying to keep control of her own laughs but it becomes harder and harder to contain them.
“So maybe it’s high time that I quit the arts and crafts thing?”
“I’d say yes. It’d probably do the world a great service if you did.”
Sokka huffs dramatically. “Dreams? Crushed. I was this close to quitting my position on the council for this.”
“Terribly sorry to have been the one to break the news, but you know. It had to happen.”
Still laughing, he lays a hand on her cheek and moves his thumb across her cheekbone. “I really missed you, you know.”
“I do. But I love hearing it.”
“And I love you.”
"I love hearing that too." Toph can’t hold back the need she has of kissing him, so she does. Softly at first, but then, they can’t seem to pull away from each other until they’re both out of breath.
“We should move this over to the room,” he says against her lips, panting slightly.
She shakes her head with a devilish smile on her face. “I’m good right here if you are.”
“You bet your ass I am.”