Chapter Text
"Mommy!"
"Shh, Lin," Toph all but begged, keeping her sightless gaze on the baby in her arms rather than shifting it to the six-year-old currently tugging at her sleeve. "Come on, Su, baby… shh, now."
"Mommy!" Lin cried again. "I'm tired." It was important that her mother knew that.
"Join the club," Toph muttered, completely unsympathetically, as she adjusted Lin's newborn sister, Suyin, in her arms so that the baby could put her mouth to her breast.
"This is the third time this night," Lin whined. She wanted—no, she needed—her mother to understand just how annoying this was; every time she began to fall asleep, Suyin's crying jolted her awake again. This had happened last night, and the night before that, and every night since Toph had brought the baby home from Kya Memorial Hospital. It had been days since Lin had gotten a good night's sleep, and Toph didn't seem to care.
"You cried all the time, too, Lin," Toph said, her eyes closed now and her voice barely above a whisper.
Lin crossed her arms over her chest and stomped her foot, causing the earth beneath her to jump—a testament to her budding power as well as her current displeasure. She knew that her mother saw as much—or, more accurately, as little—with her eyes closed as with her eyes open, but it was the principle of her having eyes closed. She could at least pretend that she was paying attention to Lin.
It was difficult for Lin, as exhausted as she was, to hold onto her anger, though, and so, as she watched her baby sister try and fail to latch onto their mother's breast (and consequently burst into hysterics again), her anger morphed back into frustration, and tears pricked her eyes.
"I can't take it anymore!" Lin yelled, her hands in fists at her sides. "I can't sleep! Make her stop! Take her back!"
Toph opened her eyes and sighed, then, with the hand she wasn't using to support Suyin, waved Lin over to her. Lin, despite her misgivings about her baby sister, walked over to Toph's rocking chair.
"I can't 'take her back,' Lin," Toph said. Her voice was softer now, very nearly apologetic. "I'm trying to make her stop crying, though. But—." Toph's fingers found Lin's jaw, and she angled Lin's face toward her own. "I need your help. You're a big sister now, so I need you to be a big girl and a good example, and to show Suyin how we behave during the night. Can you do that?"
The word "no" was on the tip of Lin's tongue. She opened her mouth to tell her mother that she couldn't do that because what people did at night was sleep, and as she had established, she couldn't sleep because Suyin wouldn't stop crying; but then something—the desperate, tired look on Toph's own face, maybe—stopped her, and what she ended up doing was biting back the words that seemed ready to claw their way out of her throat and nodding.
"Good girl," Toph said. She tilted Lin's head forward a bit so that she could press a kiss to the top of it. "Now, go back to bed. I'll be there to tuck you in again as soon as I finish feeding your sister, okay?"
"I—okay." Lin wanted to protest. She wanted, despite everything, to stay here, in the dimly lit nursery with her mom's hand buried in her hair; but she nodded and returned to her own bedroom because that was what Toph wanted her to do, and Lin wanted to please her mother more than she wanted anything else.