Series: Lots of Hits and Misses

a/n: Drabbles written for the Battleship contest over at the A:tLAFC. Participants guess spots on the Battleship field, but every time you miss, you have to write a drabble before you can guess again. So because I suck at battleship, expect this to be cluttered with a lot of them. For now, there's no structure to this seeing as how I'll never know what prompt I'm going to get next. For now, this is just a holding place for a lot of random one-shots.

Oh, and as a personal exercise, I'm gonna try and keep these between 500 and 1000 words. Let's see how I do.

OOO

Drabble Title: Crawling Through Mazes

Prompt: Toph gets lost and meets the badgermoles.

Characters/Pairings: young!Toph/No Pairings

Words: 837

OOO

It was very easy to lose your way in these caves. Toph started learning that each and every time she tippy toed out of her house when her mom and dad were being mean and were telling her that she couldn't do things that she wanted to do.

They wouldn't let her explore the town at the base of their lofty hill. They wouldn't let her run around in the gardens by herself. They wouldn't even let her brush her teeth by herself. It wasn't fair. They wouldn't listen to a word she said even though she was seven and was already a big enough girl for people to take seriously. So Toph hid in the caves so that she didn't have to listen to their stupid voices.

But the problem was that the caves were really big, and there were always different places for her to go. Sometimes she went left instead of right. Sometimes she kept going straight instead of turning around and going back the way she came. On the days when she was really mad, like today, she always lost track of where she was going and felt herself getting lost. The more Toph kept traversing the twisting tunnels, the less and less the prospect of being lost bothered her.

Initially, it was scary because she couldn't see anything and didn't know how she was going to get back. But now, she knew to just sit down on the stone floors and wait for them.

Toph was Earthbending a rock against the wall across from here when she heard crumbling rocks in the distance. She pressed her small hands into the floor and tried see if she could actually feel the crumbling rocks. She could feel the ground rumbling, that was for sure. She could also sorta-kinda-maybe tell how far away her friend was. Things were still a really fuzzy. But she guessed that was okay. Her tutor always said that you couldn't learn how to do things well if you didn't keep practicing them over and over again. He was talking about her singing lessons, but Toph was pretty sure it applied to Earthbending too.

The rumbling got closer and Toph could already recognize the sounds of claws running along the stone floors. A wet nose nuzzled her cheek, and Toph immediately smiled and brought her arms up to hug the muzzle of the huge Badgermole in front of her.

"Big Guy! You found me. That was quick," she told him excitedly.

The Badgermole sniffed her side before he nudged her hip a couple of times. That was always code for her to stand up and follow him. "Yeah, sorry, Big Guy," Toph shrugged. "I kinda got lost again. Mom and Dad were being big dumb faces today. They got me so mad I forgot where I was going." Her large friend nuzzled her side again, this one less insistent than the one before, as if he felt her anger and was trying to comfort her. That's what Toph liked about her Badgermole friends. They were very perceptive. They always knew when Toph was angry or upset. Plus, they always knew how to get her back home.

Of course, teatime wasn't for a long, long time. Toph had time to practice her bending just a little bit.

"Do you think we can try to find that big rock again?" Toph asked the Badgermole in front of her. "Small Paws and I found it the other day, but we were both too teeny to move it. But you can, Big Guy! You're gigantic!"

Toph would never know if her friends could understand her—animals didn't talk like people could—but the Badgermole seemed like he wanted to go deeper into the caves as well. He tapped the ground next to him with his nose, a gesture that meant he wanted Toph to move next to him. Toph smiled when she actually felt the tap with her feet. It was weird to see the way the Badgermoles saw. They all couldn't see like normal people could. She knew for sure, because she asked her nanny about it, and her nanny knew everything. But it was exciting too. She could finally tell where things were.

She crawled on her hands and knees next to the Badgermole. She was mirroring her friend's position as she kept her hands in front of her and her nose close to the ground. "Okay, Big Guy. I'm ready. Let's go find that boulder! Then we can go home."

The animal made a little snuffling noise that Toph thought sounded like a "yes." The Badgermole started crawling through the caves as he shoved rocks that were in his way towards the walls on either side. Toph, like the good student that she was, did the exact same thing with her Earthbending. She smiled at the feeling again. This was so much more fun that sitting and practicing her flute all day.

She could afford to stay "lost" a little bit longer.