Work Text:
The Bei Fong family was well known, full of graceful ladies and skillful lords. Their opinions carried weight in the city, and everyone curried favor for an invitation to a Bei Fong luncheon. They were the height of society, the ones that set the standards for others to follow. It had been that way for generations.
And then there was Toph.
From the moment she was born, the lofty hopes of the Bei Fong family were shattered. She couldn't see anything, and didn't seem to instinctively understand that it made her disabled and an object of pity. Such an object in the Bei Fong household would have been dressed in fine silks and satins, kept safe from harm and looked at from afar. Toph was a pretty girl, and with the appropriate dowry would have still made an excellent match when the time came.
But then came the discovery that she could Bend, and there was a rebelliousness that had risen up within the girl. Every effort to push it back failed. She simply refused to learn her place in the way of things, that she should have been silent and still, that she should have let her mother chart her course for her. It was the way things have always been, and the way things always would be. While Toph's blindness was a subject of shameful whispers and points behind their backs, she was still a pretty girl. She could still make a match.
To Toph, beauty was the feel of dirt between her toes. Beauty was the sound of stone on stone, earth falling to earth. Beauty was the efficiency of movement in Bending, of being able to feel movement with her body and reinterpret it as sight.
She wasn't disabled. She was a Master.