Louder than Bells
(I'm not dead! So, school turned out to be much more of a difficult procedure than I thought, so I haven't been… consistent… at all… So here's a little story/songfic as an apology!)
"Sit up straighter, Toph dear," her mother says again. Toph sighs and does as she is told - back never touching the chair, shoulders down, neck extended slightly, chin down. Poppy Bei Fong says it was proper - her daughter said it looked properly ridiculous.
"Zan!" Lao Bei Fong calls, and the servant - dressed in traditional green - dashes into the room and bows. "Help Toph find her chopsticks."
"Certainly," Zan replies with a bow, and walks swiftly in short, clipped steps to Toph's side, where he gently attempts to guide her hand to the utensil she knows is exactly one-foot-and-two-inches away from her.
Under the table, she gives him a swift kick in the shins.
Zan doubles over, gasping in pain, forbidden to tell the Bei Fong parents about their child's misbehavior. Toph slides her hand across the table until it hits smooth wood. She clumsily picks it up and stabs whatever is on the plate with it.
"Now Toph, remember the proper way that Kina taught you," her mother says in a syrupy voice. "Hold like a pencil, find the food, close around it tight, lift, and make absolutely sure that you're level with your mouth."
"This way's easier," Toph replies around a mouthful of dumpling.
"Young lady!" Poppy says, shocked. "What will society think of you?"
"Nothing, because they won't ever see me," her daughter retorts, and pushes away the bowl. "I'm full. No one help me."
In one fluid motion she gets up from the table, turns left military-straight, and walks stiffly out of the room, following the exact steps she had memorized.
Little did her parents knows that she turned left at the doorway, hiding behind a vase, waiting to listen.
"Oh, Lao," Poppy sighs, and the clinking of chopsticks could be heard again. "Whatever are we going to do with her?"
"She must be brought up properly, but her blindness prohibits that," Lao mused. Toph snarled under her breath and clenched her fists.
"Are you sure she's safe, wandering the inner gardens?" her mother fretted. Toph rolled her sightless eyes. Last week, after a batgopher infestation in the outer gardens, they had forbidden her from going to them. Apparently she could possible fall into one of the two-inch-wide holes. Now they were going to confine her to the house?
And then she starts to run. Starts to get away
Not really run, of course. In the house, where servants are as present as frogbees in springtime, she must keep her composure and act like nothing is wrong. She walks in the same quick manner as Zan, following where she always hears him go, but where she is not allowed to. The servant's quarters.
As she mindlessly follows the path she hears the various guards, cooks, cleaners, butlers, gardeners, and others take, she fabricates a lie in her head, knowing there was no way that Uma, the head cook, would allow her out the back entrance.
She crashes into a wall that didn't feel to be a door. Toph slowly turns around, feeling each wall, until she finds the doorknob and swings it open.
A warm stickiness washes over her. Steam. She enters the loud, clattering room slowly, never stepping out of the cloud around her. Maybe she can make it to the door without being seen this way.
No such luck. Halfway to the door, which she knows because it's open and night air is entering the room, a booming voice says, "Toph?"
She winces and turns around to the source of the voice. Uma the head cook was standing over her.
"I'm sorry, Miss Uma," she said in her most painfully dull, polite voice. "Before father wisely forbid me from leaving the house, I left a favored toy of mine out in the yard. You do not mind if I leave for only a moment and get it, will you?"
"Well, since you asked so nicely, no," Uma says, and Toph fights back a sigh of relief. "But you better be back in in three minute's time, Miss Bei Fong. Master Bei Fong recently gave me the job of Deputy Nanny, which I will most certainly take seriously."
"Thank you, Miss Uma!" Toph says exuberantly, forcing her cheeks to color. It has the desired effect - Uma pinches her cheeks and coos a bit.
Then, practicing the walk her mother taught her, she breezes out of the door and into the cool night air.
She nearly shouts with relief once outside, then realizes she has a slight problem. Toph has never been in this part of the house before - she'd be caught in a second!
"No matter," she murmured to herself, and slowly slid her foot forward. It came to a step, and she walks slowly down it. At the base of the small flight of stairs is a pair of tatted old shoes that are too big for her, but she puts them on anyway.
And then, like that, she is off.
Toph begins slowly at first - walking Zan-style, fast but not fast enough. She tramps through the cultivated fields and gardens of the Bei Fong Estate, heading northwest from the northernmost door of the house. She knows from maps that to the north, northeast, east, and south was Gaoling - west was nearly impenetrable forest. She hadn't heard anything of the northwest.
Then suddenly, her shoes transition from dirt rows to grass hill, and she's free.
Toph knows the general direction she is heading in - that's all she needs to know. And then she is running, really running, for the first time in her life.
There's a drumming noise inside my head
That starts when you're around
I swear that you could hear it
It makes such an almighty sound
She plunges into the forest, the temperature drop quite noticeable. Toph stumbles and falls, but picks herself up again, losing the big shoes in the process.
There's a drumming noise inside my head
That throws me to the ground
I swear that you could hear it
It makes such an almighty sound
Toph somehow manages to dodge the hundreds of trees in her way, bare feet slapping against the cool earth. Sweat is pouring down her pale, unexposed face. Blood is pounding in her ears.
Louder than sirens
Louder than bells
Sweeter than heaven
And hotter than hell
A vine attempts to trip her, snagging her dress and tearing it. She hardly notices, the thumping of her heart overcoming the sound of the rip of delicate fabric.
I ran to a tower where the church bells chime
I hope that they would clear my mind
They left a ringing in my ears
But that drum's still beating loud and clear
Toph refused to be that fabric. Refused to be that piece of silk that fell to pieces when touched.
Louder than sirens
Louder than bells
Sweeter than heaven
And hotter than hell
She feels dirty all over. Plants are rubbing against her nearly translucent skin, getting caught in her hair. Her toes were bleeding from the sudden physical exercise.
She loves it.
As I move my feet towards your body
I can hear this beat it fills my head up
And gets louder and louder
It fills my head up and gets louder and louder
Her feet are suddenly doused in cold water. She has hit a stream. It feels both wonderful and terrible against her weakened feet. Toph wades in, continuing on, allowing the tears that threatened to burst to fall. They splashed against the sloshing water, so frequent that she couldn't tell the difference between the two.
I run to the river and dive straight in
I pray that the water will drown out the din
But as the water fills my mouth
It couldn't wash the echoes out
But as the water fills my mouth
It couldn't wash the echoes out
She hears her parents again and again. She's weak, too fragile, can't go outside, too dangerous… Why couldn't they understand? She couldn't live like this!
I swallow the sound and it swallows me whole
Till there's nothing left inside my soul
As empty as that beating drum
But the sound has just begun
Her feet hit solid earth. Not the cool slipperiness of the forest loam, but a compact rock that she has never before felt.
As I move my feet towards your body
I can hear this beat it fills my head up
And gets louder and louder
It fills my head up and gets louder and louder
She crawls up a steep slope of this rock, feeling her way, until she finds that it is the mouth of a giant cave, hidden within the forest. Still crying, she walks in on all fours.
Toph crawls in, far enough from the entrance to feel some semblance of warmth. The ground is warm, she notices, not the air.
And there she sat, crying, lying on the stones of a cave far away from the restrictions of home. Had anyone even noticed that she was gone? Had they already decided to have another baby, to replace the little lost blind one? She cries even harder, slumping her shoulders in defeat.
Suddenly there was a giant crash behind her. Toph's tears stop flowing immediately, and she wipes her face. Who was there? Was the cave falling in?
A warm, wet, musky breath breathes onto her, and something huge breathes in deeply. She imitates it, just for fun. Suddenly it licks her, its colossal tongue nearly knocking her over. Toph giggles and feels its face for the nose, where she licks it in return.
She knows what these are, the first Earthbenders of them all. The badgermoles.
Her new friend backs away - she can tell because the warm breath isn't there anymore, and walks slowly away, swishing its tail, telling her to follow.
Toph smiles with joy. Badgermoles were blind, just like her. They could help her be independent. She crawls after the great creature, imitating how it walked. What was it doing? It walked by sweeping its paws forwards, then pushing back at an angle. She tried it out, and found that it made her move even faster than how Zan walked back at home.
Her eyebrows knitted together in concentration. The badgermole was showing her something, she was sure of it. But what?
The Tale of Oma and Shu, her favorite story to listen to, told of how to badgermoles were ruthlessly powerful yet never used it for bad. She had always imagine great boulders - whatever they looked like - flying a straight course through the sky, thrown by the most powerful creatures on earth.
No, she realized. That wasn't Earthbending.
She feels the ground, feels the quiet tremors created by the badgermole. She was aware that it was crushing boulders into pieces using Earthbending, if the pieces of rubble her knees touched were any indication. She would've felt the power of Earthbending if it had been like in the books.
Toph thought about it, all the while crawling like the badgermole. How did it utilize its power without changing its movement?
And then it came to her. A grin spreads across her face as she slides her hand across the ground, concentrating on a shard of rock she felt in front of her.
It skitters away from her.
A wave of happiness coursed through her. She had Earthbended! Again she tried it, and to her delight it wasn't just pure luck. The pebbles left in the badgermole's wake flew to opposite sides of the cave, clearing the path for her to walk. All the while Toph slid her hands across the ground. Now she understood the warmth of the stone - when her fingers touched the ground, it was almost as if each individual rock had a pulsating heart that told her exactly where it was.
She stood up, imitating the arm movement with her feet, and it works - only better. She moves them different ways, letting the pebbles circle around her feet and on the ground.
Toph heard another crash, and knew that her badgermole friend had cleared the way for her again. It had done so, if the tremors had been right, by merely sweeping its arm away.
She feels a particularly large rock in front of her, one that felt embedded in the cave. She lifts her arms, directing the energy in them towards the rock, and stomps twice.
The rock uproots itself and flings itself away.
She giggled, and laughed, and nearly cried all at once. She Earthbended everything around her, never faltering in her step, the vibrations of the stone telling her anything she needed to know. Never again would she needed to be told where something was. Never again would she require exacting paths through her house just in order to go from one room to the next.
The badgermole has stopped moving again, and Toph ran up its side to the face, where she pets the nose and licks it. Then, as a demonstration, she circles a ring of stones around the giant creature. She swore it almost chuckled.
"Thank you," she whispered, and she can almost see the face, the face that was identical to hers and different all at the same time.
"Thank you so much."
As I move my feet towards your body
I can hear this beat it fills my head up
And gets louder and louder
It fills my head up and gets louder and louder