It's way too easy to give her nanny the slip. Toph has perfected the art, and this caretaker is especially lax with the rules. Or rather, Yui-san has learned that damage control is much easier than Toph control.
The only problem is all the trees. And long grasses. And there's so much loose dirt, Toph can hardly see more than five feet ahead of herself.
"Fuck!" She growls. She heard the cook say it once after injuring his finger, and it feels appropriate even if she isn't sure what it means. Another branch whacks her in the face and Toph screams as she swats it away, feeling the lingering sting over her forehead. Slowly, she draws to a stop in the brush, scowling. "I know I can do this," she mutters venomously, slapping her cheeks. "Concentrate, Beifong!"
If she can't walk through a stupid forest without smacking into every plant, how is she ever going to get by on her own? Will she be stuck clinging to someone's arm, clutching a dumb walking stick, her entire life?
"Fuck, no." Toph breathes, and shuts her useless eyes. Concentrate. Be patient. Something tells her she has to be patient. There isn't much wind, but there's enough to make everything rustle and swish and crunch and chatter—ugh, it's all a mess in her ears, she needs more to understand what's around her. Concentrate, she thinks again, dragging one foot across the ground. Too muffled.
After a moment Toph kicks off her shoes and yanks off her socks for good measure, and when she sets her feet down this time—"That's the stuff," Toph sighs in relief, pressing her toes into the earth. She focuses on the sensation, and then stomps on the ground experimentally. The vibrations spread around her as always, but the waves are muddled and dampened. Why? She can feel the earth there, it's all around, twisting between harder rocks and roots—
Roots. The plants. Ugh, nature. It's still muddling her senses. If she could just get her vibrations to go further, go faster, maybe—maybe—
Toph stomps harder. Nothing. She can feel the stupid tree on her right, though. She stomps again, shifting her weight as she does so—and there's a swish of leaves all around her, like the trees are quivering in fright.
Toph grins. Yeah, you better be afraid of me, she wants to shout at the world. She spreads her legs, bending them at the knee to keep her balance. It feels right. It feels natural. Lifting her left leg high, Toph brings her foot down hard, like she's sending a message through the earth itself.
And the ground trembles beneath her. She can see everything, from the shuddering trees to tiny blades of grass. There's a crater around her foot, rippling outward in each direction. She did that? But she's not strong enough to break the rocks beneath her! And she's stomped on earth before, she's jumped and kicked and tapped the ground many times.
But not like this. Not while focusing her mind, reaching out to feel all around. Toph shifts back into her stance, knees bent, back straight—and when she stomps, she tells the earth to m o v e.
A boulder erupts in front of her. Unconsciously, she modifies her stance, raising a tight fist.
Crrr— k!
The punch is sharp and confident, but only as powerful as a little girl could make it. In the same instance she sees the whole shape and size of the rock and shatters it along its fault lines, reducing it to pebbles at her feet.
Her knuckles sting a little, and Toph shakes out her hand. The world before her is crisper than ever, and she doesn't need to stomp so much to feel the earth. There are natural vibrations here and there, a tree shuddering in the wind, a bug landing on a tall flower, and if she stays focused, Toph can see it all. The earth is alive.
Toph feels alive too.
She hastily tries calling up another boulder from the ground—and nothing. Her heart hammers in her chest. How did she do it the first time? She sent a shockwave through the ground, and the rock responded, right? It doesn't feel right. Toph screws up her face in concentration and begins stomping, punching, kicking. Just yelling at the earth doesn't work—just stomping on the ground won't get it to respond. Toph needs to fight it. Give it an order, and be purposeful about it.
She needs to—to bend the earth to her will.
Toph digs her heel into the earth, and the ground rises to her will. She didn't even need to stomp this time. The earth just listens to her. She can bend it however she wants. Like in the old folktale of the Avatar, a legendary master of elements. The Avatar could bend the powers of nature.
Earthbending. She likes how that sounds.
She finds a clearing to practice in; an expanse of treeless ground with one side blocked off by a high cliff of jagged rocks. There, Toph finds out exactly what she's capable of doing.
Leaping off a shelf of earth, Toph roars as she pummels another boulder—this one's at least twice her height!—into dust. The shockwave ripples out around her, and she can feel the moment a fruit of some kind is shaken loose from a tree. Toph stretches out her hands eagerly, and something round and hard drops into her palms. She's grinning so hard, her cheeks are going to ache for days. She tries taking a bite and finds out it's a gross-tasting apple, but still.
The realization hits somewhere between punching through her eighth boulder and raising a (precarious) wall of earth twelve feet tall: Toph doesn't just see with her quirk, she can fight with it.
And she wants to fight, Toph realizes. Every rock she punches into dust, every tremor she can generate, it's exhilarating. Using her quirk like this is amazing. She wants to do this every day, for the rest of her life. She wants to show the world how awesome she is, how powerful she can be.
For once, Toph doesn't mind being blind. Not when she can do this.
Toph digs her hands into the earth, loving the way the ground softens beneath her, yields to her every command. She won't be treated like glass when she can crush boulders with her bare hands. They can't say she's fragile when she can lift mountains. So she gets to work.
With the skills of her nanny in cleaning up the evidence, Toph is allowed to return to the mountains every other week. Yui-san takes her by train one day while their driver is unavailable, and Toph is carefully quiet during the trip there and back, mapping out her path.
Then, Toph sneaks out on a Tuesday evening while her parents are away and the mansion is mostly empty. She has no train ticket, no money or phone. Her watch will read out the time to her if she presses it, and she keeps track of the hour while she practices. If even one thing had gone wrong, Toph could've been in serious trouble. She fumbles a few times, catching the eye of a concerned mother; a whispered conversation between two businessmen wondering where Toph's going. At one point Toph gets very close to being caught by a ticket inspector, but notices him in time to sneak away.
No one stops her.
She continues to practice whenever she can escape, and the older she gets, the easier it is to fool everyone. Toph learns which trains run late, and pays careful attention to the sort of people she encounters. Villainous activity is higher at night, and while Toph isn't afraid of anything, she's not stupid. She waits. She listens. She practices where no one will find her.
And that is Toph's life for the next year.
She's a week away from her seventh birthday when she meets Twinkletoes.
It starts with some odd rustling trees. Toph is still focusing on making a boulder three times her size float into the air, and ignores it. But the wind is strange. It's too… sharp.
"WHATCHA DOING?" A young, loud boy screams at her out of nowhere, and Toph gasps as the boulder crashes down at her feet. "OH MY GOD!"
Toph whips around, trying locate the voice. Why is it so windy? Suddenly the wind disperses and a person steps onto the earth—from where? Did he fly?—and Toph can sense a boy, taller and sturdier than her, standing just a few meters away.
"What're you doing here?" Toph demands, facing him.
"I'm hunting bugs! How'd you lift such a big rock? You must be pretty strong!" Something plastic and metal and cloth clatters to the floor by his feet. A box? A net? Whatever it is, he's abandoned it to talk with her.
She pauses, relaxing a little. "Yeah, I am," Toph agrees smugly.
"I'm strong too though! I can fly!" And then he jumps up and disappears from her again, completely baffling Toph. He's gone. Like a bird. She hates birds. The wind disappears as he lands once more. "Hey, why do your eyes look like that?"
Toph scowls, belatedly fixing her bangs so they hang over her face. "They just do."
And instead of taking that for an answer, the boy takes as an invitation to run—dance?—right up to her to get a better look. "They're strange!" He exclaims cheerfully, and Toph flinches back at his closeness.
"Get away from me, Twinkletoes," She snaps, pushing his chest with both hands. He doesn't move as much as she'd like.
"Twinkletoes?"
"Yeah, Twinkletoes," Toph declares with a nasty grin, "Because you walk so lightly, I can barely sense it."
"Sense it? Whatcha mean? And why aren't you looking at me? Are you sure your eyes are okay?"
"Shut up," Toph growls, tensing up. "Or I'll bury you alive!"
"Huh? Whaddya mean—?"
And then Toph has the earth swallow him up, right up to his waist.
"HOLY MOLY! THIS IS AMAZING!"
Okay. Not the response she was hoping for. "Keep yelling and I'll bury you all the way," Toph hisses, carefully listening for any more people nearby. "I'm not supposed to be out this late, you'll get me in trouble."
"OH! Oh. Okay!" He whisper-shouts. "Hang on, you can get me out of this, right?"
Toph pretends to think about it. "Only if you promise me something."
"Anything! I'm Inasa Yoarashi, by the way!"
"That's nice, Twinkletoes," Toph rolls her eyes and stomps on the ground, bending him out of the earth. "Now," she says ominously, jabbing a finger at him. "I wanna fight you!"
"WHAT?" He flails. She can hear his heart if she listens carefully, fluttering like a hummingbird. She can use that for when he's in the air, he can't hide from her that way.
"I don't wanna fight!" Inasa whines. "I wanna be friends!"
… Friends?
Toph is startled into silence. She didn't think of that. "You can be my friend IF you fight me," she decides. "Quirks allowed. First one to give up or get pinned down loses—we'll be careful, I won't hurt you if you don't hurt me," she promises.
He seems uncomfortable for a moment, shifting from foot to foot. "How about a time limit, too? And will you still be my friend if I win?"
(Privately, Toph thinks she'll only be his friend if he wins)
"Yeah. Oh, and I'm Toph. Let's fight for… ten minutes?"
"I have a stopwatch!" Twinkletoes says eagerly, fiddling with the device on his wrist. "Okay, all set, Toph?"
She spreads her legs into a more balanced stance and grins. "Yep. Let's go, Twinkles!"
He presses a button to start the timer, and then leaps towards her.
Twinkletoes is good. He dances to dodge her rocks, and Toph has to dig her heels into the earth to withstand his powerful gusts of wind. They're both breathing heavily, hearts hammering, equally exhausted. But he's never seen someone like Toph fight before, and she's sure she's about to pin him down when his watch's timer starts beeping.
"Dang it!" She huffs.
Toph lets her attack crumble down to nothing as the dust settles. Then Twinkletoes leaps to his feet, sending dust everywhere anyway. "That was fun! You're really cool, Toph!"
"Thanks," she grins, panting a little. "Your quirk is hard for me to fight."
"Right back atcha! They're like opposites! Earth and air!" He dances closer to her, breathless, with a smile in his tone. Toph earthbends them a bench to rest on, and he takes a seat very close to her. "Hey…Toph?" He asks timidly, or what could pass for timid in his case.
She dusts off her shirt. "Yeah?"
"Um. Why do you hide your eyes like that? You don't really seem like you're shy." He asks. Toph is a little surprised, but she's learned through fighting him that Inasa is more observant than he initially seemed.
After a moment of deliberation, Toph pushes her bangs carefully behind each ear, letting him see her eyes properly. She can hear his intake of breath as he puts the pieces together.
"You—You can't see me, can you?"
She hates the pity in his voice. It makes her want to fight all over again.
"How'd you fight me?" He continues curiously. "You're so good at it, too!"
Her mouth twitches upward. "I use my quirk. I can use it like another sense, so when your feet are on the ground, I can 'see' you."
"Twinkletoes," The name dawns on the boy like a bright sun. "But, but you still can't see me when I'm using my quirk!"
Toph snorts. "No, but I sure can hear you."
He's practically vibrating with excitement, and reaches out to grab her shoulder urgently. "Toph, when are you gonna come back? We should fight again! Or, what's it called, sparring! It's good practice for when we're heroes!"
Toph blinks. "Heroes?"
"Yeah!" He pumps a fist into the air, and then looks at her curiously. "Don't you wanna be a hero?" He asks expectantly. Like it shouldn't even be a question. "You'd make an awesome hero, you're so good at it already!"
"Yeah," Toph agrees, her chest feeling light. His hand is still on her shoulder, a warm and friendly weight. "Yeah, let's be heroes, Inasa!"
