"Su! Will you stop acting so childish?" Lin growled, watching her little sister play on the decorative fountain in the center of the gala.
"I am a child, MOM." Su stuck out her tongue at her big sister, "Just because you're an earthbender doesn't mean you gotta be a stick in the mud."
"Brat." She'd show her 'stick in the mud'.
"Hag." Su retorted as she always did, but with a grin this time. Lin walked away first, and that was personal achievement for her... and it should have made her suspicious. She noticed Lin's arm move slightly upwards a split second too late. The stone rose from the fountain's foundation at a great speed, making the water splash her, "Oohhh, I'm gonna get you." She seethed through clenched teeth, hopping off and tailing her sister who, as luck would have it, got stuck in the crowd behind a group of Earth Kingdom nobles. 'You're dead', she signaled with code they used when they didn't want their mom to hear the conversation.
'I'm so scared.' Lin signaled back sarcastically when Su managed to catch up.
'You should be. Stop hiding behind these rich guys and face me like a man'. The men and women in front of them either didn't notice them or didn't care that they were in the way, and so they didn't budge an inch to let the girls through.
'I'm not a man, idiot. And you're hiding behind them too, we're stuck here.'
'I'm not an idiot. And you sure do look like a man.'
'You're asking for it, Brat.'
'Oh, I'm so scared. I-'
'Hold it.' Lin grabbed Su's wrists with one hand and motioned for her to listen with the other.
"-ifong. But while she may have been a war hero, now she's just a whore with two bastard brats."
"What the-" A strong hand clamped the youngest Beifong's mouth shut before a very inappropriate word came out of it. The nobles finally noticed two young people in close vicinity of their conversation. One was around thirteen, with a murderous look was on her face. She was soaking wet with a hand holding arms down and another over her mouth. The second, probably eighteen or nineteen, kept the younger one at bay, but she was obviously no less angry.
"Excuse us, My Lords and Ladies." Lin said as politely as she could, which wasn't very polite at all with the tone she was using, but at least there were no obscenities, "May we please get through?" They parted the way without a word, "Thank you."
"You should've let me deck him!" Su yelled when Lin finally released her grip on the rooftop.
"And have my little sister arrested for assault?!" The elder sibling made sure to block the trap door so Su couldn't go back and get herself into trouble.
"You heard what he called Mom!"
"Yeah, I heard." Lin sulked as the kid kept raging on. She wanted to hit the guy as much as Su did, but some of the most important people in the city and the Earth Kingdom were in that room, so they had to behave themselves.
"He comes to our city in his fancy car, with his fancy servants and diamond rings-"
"You still wanna learn how to drive, Brat?" Lin asked casually.
"I wanna drive his head into the ground!"
"I'll take that as a 'yes'. Come on." She grabbed her little sister's arm and jumped of the roof, using her bending to give them a soft landing.
"What the hell, Lin?!"
"One, watch your language. Two, stop talking. Three, get in the car."
"Which car?" The hand previously held her tongue rose up and turned her head so that it was facing the most gaudy vehicle in the lot. No question who that belonged to.
"Oh. That car." Was she really hearing this? Lin. Her big sister, who constantly hounded her about rules, was suggesting that they steal a car, "I'm in."
…...
"Break! Turn right!"
"AHHHH!"
"JUMP!"
CRASH!
"Not bad for my first lesson, huh?" Su appreciated a job well done.
"Not bad at all. I'm just glad it wasn't in my car." It took a lot of hard work to get that thing and she wasn't about to lose it because her bratty sister wanted to drive.
"It looks better with the tree attached to it. Bastard will think twice before he calls mom a whore again."
"Watch your language..." alright so maybe this one time Su had a point, "but he is a bastard, isn't he? Let's go." They didn't want to be around when the rescue crew arrived, "Make sure that you don't leave any footprints."
"I'm not stupid." There was only one flaw in this plan, now they had to walk all the way home from the park. By the time they got there, two detectives were waiting with their mother for them. And they were there to ask the infamous question 'what do you two know about Nobleman Hu's car?'.
"Nothing. The guy insulted our mom, I took Su to the roof to cool off before she got us both arrested."
"And I punched her," she got a dirty look from Lin, like the kid could take her on, "ran back down and out the side back door-"
"Past a sleeping guard, you should talk to that guy, Mom. She ran off to her friend Ming's house and started crying." Cue a dirty look from Su. She didn't cry when boys called her names, she beat them up.
"And then Lin came in and started sobbing, too. We just couldn't handle mom seeing us until we looked presentable again. It's just so hard," at this point she decided to turn on the waterworks for good measure, "not having dads and everyone calling us names because of it."
"Bet that is tough." One of the detectives sympathized.
"Enough." Toph couldn't take it any more, "Detectives, these two crimes are obviously linked. Start with the house and go from there."
"Yes Chief." They had their orders, so they left the Beifong home to carry them out.
"You 'couldn't handle your mom seeing you'?" Toph laughed, waving a hand in front of her face, "Gotta work on those coverups, Su." The girl in question did a facepalm, how could she forget that? Well, the two cops didn't seem to make the connection either. "You two have fun during the joyride?"
"I drove, Mom. All the way to the park!"
"Until you crashed."
"...Lin told me to." Trust her little sister to throw her to the wolfbats.
"Crashing it was your idea," Lin defended herself, "I was just going to hide it."
"No you weren't."
"Yes, I was."
"Enough!" Toph shook her head before verbally reminding herself, "Children a blessing. Calm down, you two knuckleheads. If I was gonna turn you in, I'd done it already. Now I gotta go back to work, some crook demolished the front of Nobleman Hu's summer home, along with a 'priceless family vase'. Good thing too," she said with her trademark mischievous grin, "because I was half a second away from pulverizing that jerk for insulting my girls."
"Lin," Su looked up at her sister after their mom walked out, "did mom..."
"I think so, Su."
"So...when's my next driving lesson?"
"Twenty years from tomorrow."
