Chapter Text
It takes her a few years to really understand what kind of mess she’s found herself in. But to be fair, no one will let her get her feet on solid ground for months.
(The details of her first life have already started to fade. She can’t quite place the planes of Sugar Queen’s face or the sound of Twinkletoes’ glider as it slides open. She knows that she was never old in her first life- that she’d never lived long enough to feel her bones creak in the morning or the warmth of a lover's lips. She remembers being loved and cherished- not so much by her parents- but at the least by a family that she built piece by broken piece.
Some days even their names slip away.
The only part of herself she never forgets, or doubts is that she knows she was born to be barefoot. The solid tracts of land she’s so close to but can't touch call to her, begging her to come home to them.)
Toph counts her days by feedings (and wasn't that gag-worthy, having to drink at a woman's breast?). When enough days pass by that she knows this isn't some poison-induced fever dream or boulder-related head injury, she decides that this is some spirit nonsense, and it should absolutely not fall to her to have to deal with it.
Because, honestly, what the fuck?
When days slide into weeks into months and her eyes never clear past the hazy light sense of a newborn, she screeches in outrage to the limits of her young vocal cords, throwing a temper tantrum the servants whisper lowly about for years to come. If the spirits saw fit to make her live a second life, couldn't they have at the very least let her see?
Neither Oma nor Shu sees fit to answer her demands, and so she finally settles and bides her time waiting for those around her to make a mistake.
(And it will be a mistake, she knows, to put her on the ground and let her press her feet into the dirt. She’d lived a life in which she’d bent under her parents’ wishes and simmered waiting and longing to be more than the Beifong’s poor, blind daughter. Never again would she be less than exactly who she is, Toph promises herself upon the memory of her beloved badgermoles.)
Finally, after months of being carted around from place to place like a prized pet, a woman with soft skin and long fingers (her mother, Toph’s mind provides before she shoves that thought away. She’d had enough of mothers for two lifetimes) places her on the ground and greets the man with a rough beard that he likes to rub gently against the top of her head (her father, she knows, but she’s had enough of fathers as well).
“My lord,” Lady Stark begins as Toph begins to edge to the corner of the blanket she’s been placed on.
“Cat,” Lord Stark replies wearily.
“I’ve come to discuss Sansa,” she replies tightly. Toph barely bobs her head at the sound of her name. She’s heard san-sa cooed at her enough to know that’s what they call her in this world. She wonders what it means, briefly. Toph she knows means lotus flower. Does Sansa mean something equally sweet that she won’t live up to?
Lord Stark begins to speak, but Lady Stark cuts him off decisively. “We must discuss her options.”
Lord Stark sighs heavily, and Toph ignores him as her fingers touch something solid and grainy. Stone, she almost weeps in relief. But, instead, she pushes forward on her soft, infant belly, alternating between pleas and curses at spirits she refuses to put her faith in.
“She is our daughter,” he says. “A daughter of the North. Her sight will not change that.”
Toph-in-Sansa hears the beginning of Lady Stark's curt response, but then she finally manages to fully roll from the cloth blanket to the stone floor and press her heels into the ground.
For a brief, terrifying second, there is nothing, and then the world rushes in: she can see the steel sword at Lord Stark's hip and the twists of copper around Lady Stark's neck. She can feel two children playing nearby and the way they stumble after one another. She can count the buildings and the fortifications that make up her home and trace the hidden passageways and corridors she’ll soon explore.
She is no longer Toph Beifong, but she's long ago learned that she is much more than her name. So with the feeling of stone against her toes and to the background music of her second set of parents arguing, she is reborn as Sansa Stark.
Westeros is never the same.