#11.

TDBB: Interlude #11.

Ivy had, in her life, survived a chemical accident that had rewritten her at the cellular level, incarceration in Arkham on four separate occasions, and a campaign to reforest a three-block radius of the Robinson Park that had required her to sleep in a hollow oak for eleven days.

She had never, before this, slept on tunnel floor.

She was doing it now. She had been doing it for thirty days.

She had stopped counting the hours by the end of the first week, when the rhythm of the tunnels had replaced the rhythm of the city above.

Toph moved when she moved, slept when she slept, ate when she found something worth eating, and had no opinion about any of it. She existed in a relationship to time that Ivy found deeply irritating and had, over the course of a month, come to understand and refused to admit she understood.

The training had continued on the second day.

-0-

"Wider."

Ivy widened her stance.

"Wider."

"My hips don't go further than--"

The floor shifted under her left foot and pushed it out another four inches and she stumbled and caught herself, the adjustment running up through her spine in a correction she hadn't made but that her body settled into anyway.

"There," Toph said, from somewhere behind her. "Now you're standing."

"I was standing before."

"You were balancing. There's a difference."

There was. Ivy had known it abstractly -- she had studied enough of her own fluid combat style to understand that it relied on constant motion to compensate for the narrow base her intuition kept pulling her back to. She moved to avoid being still. It worked, and it was also, she had been told on the first day of thirty, her biggest flaw.

She hated that Toph had seen it in one encounter.

She hated more that she was right.

The vines moved differently from a wide stance. She had not expected that. She had expected the form to feel wrong, to fight it, to eventually find her own way through or around it -- the same thing she did with every system that tried to contain her.

Instead, on the third day, she had thrown a vine from the forced low position and felt it arrive with a weight and precision she hadn't been able to reproduce before, and she had stood in the tunnel for a moment longer than she'd meant to, reading the feeling, before Toph had said, from the dark, "Again."

She had done it again.

-0-

The tunnels moved. That was the other thing she hadn't anticipated -- the constant movement, the map never fixed, Toph reshaping their route underground the way someone adjusts their walking pace.

They never stayed more than two days in one chamber. Ivy had stopped trying to track their location relative to the surface by the end of the first week, when it became clear that the underground territory Toph had mapped was larger than she had initially assumed and was still growing.

She slept where Toph stopped.

She ate what the tunnel offered, with one exception she had been firm about, which Toph had found unreasonably entertaining.

"You'd survive on it," Toph said, pulling apart the skewer with complete satisfaction. "It's meat."

"My body does not process rat."

"Your body has processed worse."

"My body has processed worse in the service of botany. That's different." Ivy adjusted her position against the limestone, pulling her knees up. "Tell me you are not eating the tail."

"The tail has the most meat."

Ivy looked away.

Toph had, despite everything, been resourceful. The water table ran deep under the tunnels and she could feel where it pressed against the old stone. On days when Ivy had started to feel the particular grim weight of accumulated underground living, she would find her at the stone wall when she woke with her palm pressed to it, pulling the water up through the rock in a controlled column that filled a hollow she'd cut in the floor.

Clean, cold, moving water, contained in shaped stone, and she never mentioned it or made anything of it.

Ivy had her shower. Toph sat nearby with her feet in a patch of wet soil, picking something from her ear with a finger, completely comfortable in the way of something that had found its correct environment.

"You were raised by people who had staff for this," Ivy said once, from the water, having assembled enough of Toph's references across the previous weeks to have a rough picture.

"They tried to give me maids," Toph agreed.

"And?"

"Took me about a month to convince them I wasn't going to use them."

"How."

A pause. "Mud," Toph said.

Ivy had laughed before she could stop herself, which she didn't acknowledge and Toph didn't remark on. That was the agreement they had tacitly built across the thirty days -- the things that passed between them had no formal weight given to them, and so they accumulated without pressure, which was the only way Ivy had ever been able to accumulate anything.

-0-

The sparring got harder in the second week.

Not harder as in more difficult obstacles -- harder as in Toph stopped adjusting the floor for her and started fighting back.

The first time a rock connected with Ivy's shoulder she had whipped a vine at Toph's position on reflex alone, and Toph had stepped out of it with the casual economy of someone who had been reading the throw since the vine left the root, and the rock had been followed by two more before Ivy had her feet reset.

"Form," Toph said.

Ivy got her feet wide.

The third rock she caught.

She felt it in the vine the moment the tendril closed around it -- a solidity in the grip, the weight of the stone transferring through the plant tissue into her own hands, and she understood in her body what Toph had been saying about connection, about the difference between directing and controlling, asking and forcing.

She held the rock for a moment.

"Well?" Toph said.

Ivy sent it back.

Toph stopped it with two fingers.

"Don't telegraph," she said, and the lesson continued.

She telegraphed less. Her base widened, in time, until the wide stance stopped feeling imposed and started feeling like a choice, and her vines followed the shift without her asking them to -- the root connections pulling taut with a precision she hadn't felt since the chamber, when Toph had told her she was forcing instead of asking and she had wanted very much to argue and had not been able to, because her hands had already known it was true.

The forms, Toph explained only once, had names. She didn't use them. She showed them in her body and in the floor she pushed Ivy into, and she corrected with adjustment rather than instruction, and she never once said well done.

"I'm telling you," Toph said, on an afternoon Ivy had lost track of, "that you are not enough."

She had just put Ivy on the floor for the third time in twenty minutes. Ivy was breathing through her nose, her palms flat on the stone, reading the set of her own position and letting the breathing settle. She had found, somewhere in the second week, that this was faster than arguing.

"That's your version of a compliment," Ivy said.

Toph said nothing.

The silence stretched, and Ivy looked up, and Toph's expression was doing the thing she had noticed it doing when she was working out something she didn't intend to say out loud.

"Get up." Toph said.

Ivy got up.

-0-

She didn't learn much about her across thirty days. She learned that she loved the earth the way Ivy loved her plants -- not romantically, not symbolically, but with the concrete devotion of something that had come home and kept coming home.

She learned that she had been young once in a way that had been difficult, and that she had found her way through it with stubbornness and her feet, and that the stubbornness had never left and she had no interest in it leaving.

She learned that she had people somewhere she cared about and that she kept that care at a careful distance, and Ivy had not asked about it because she recognized the arrangement.

What she could not determine, for most of the thirty days, was why she had stayed.

She had told herself it was strategic. That the goals aligned -- the city, the forest, the specificity of someone who wanted to see the concrete give way to something alive.

She told herself it was the demonstration in the tunnel with Batman, the vine-connection she had felt in her hands, the practical evidence that Toph had something she wanted. All of that was true.

None of it was the reason.

The reason arrived on about the third day, somewhere in the middle of the second hour of the stance work, when Toph had corrected her foot position and said, "You're holding back because you don't believe the vine will carry the weight," and she had heard it land in her chest with the specific accuracy of something that had been true for a long time and that nobody had bothered to notice.

Her father had noticed things. He had been the one person who had looked at her with the specific attention of someone who found her worth understanding, before the framing, before everything that came after it, and she had carried that quality of attention as a reference point for years without ever finding it again.

Toph looked at her through her feet.

It was not the same. Toph had no sentimentality about her and no investment in what she was before, only what she could become and how fast she was willing to get there, and she expressed care the way she expressed everything -- as a statement of fact, a correction, an expectation that you would do better because she had told you that you could.

There was no warmth in it and no judgment in it and no ulterior motive she had bothered to hide, and Ivy had trusted her before she decided to, which was the only trust she had ever been able to sustain.

She had stayed because nobody had looked at her like that in a very long time.

She didn't say so.

-0-

On the thirtieth day, Ivy was in the water.

Toph had pulled it up that morning after a session that had gone long -- Ivy's vines moving in a spread Toph had called close, which was the nearest thing to praise she issued -- and the water was cold and clean and Ivy had her eyes closed, her hair loose, her palms on the stone rim of the basin.

She heard footsteps that came to a stop before her.

"I told you," Ivy said, without opening her eyes, and using vines to conceal parts of herself, "to stop doing that."

"You keep forgetting something important about me," Toph said. "I'm blind."

A pause.

"But I don't need eyes to map all those curves you've got," Toph added.

Ivy opened her eyes. "Naughty little girl."

Toph's mouth twitched. She tilted her chin.

"I finished planting the last of the seeds," Toph said. She had her hands behind her back, her feet wide on the stone. "We've mapped most of the city. Time to see whether you're ready for what comes next."

The water pulled away. The basin drained back into the floor, the stone closing smooth, and the chamber reorganized under Toph's feet -- floor leveling, walls pulling back, the space opening into the wide fighting oval Ivy had come to recognize as the arrangement Toph chose when she intended to be serious.

Ivy stood in the middle of it, wet, her hair down.

"Right now?"

Toph's hands came out from behind her back.

The first rock hit the air three feet from Ivy's face before she had finished the question.

Ivy's feet went wide.

She didn't think about it. The stance arrived in her body without instruction, and her vines spread outward from her palms in a radial reach that covered the full arc of the incoming debris, a half-dozen tendrils catching a half-dozen rocks simultaneously in a grip that held the weight and transferred it back through her hands.

She felt every one.

The second volley came wider, faster, a spread meant to outrun the reach she'd shown, and she shifted her base left and sent two vines ahead of the throw rather than tracking it, the tendrils finding the trajectory before the rocks arrived, and the grip came clean.

The third rock she missed.

The tendril grazed it, lost it, and she felt the miss in her hands before she saw it, and she exhaled and shifted her weight and curled the trailing vine along the debris' line of travel, following the arc, and at the last point of reach she flicked.

The rock came back at Toph.

Toph stopped it between two fingers.

The silence that followed had a quality Ivy had learned to read.

"Are you trying," Toph said, "to take my eyes."

"I didn't think it'd bother you."

"I've been teaching you bending martial arts." Toph's mouth pulled at one side. "Not how to be me."

Ivy held her vine. "Isn't it the same thing?"

A beat. Toph's head tilted.

"Your skills have improved," she said.

Ivy went still. In thirty days, she had not heard it phrased that way.

"Are you actually--"

"It's not enough," Toph said, and the silence came back, and it stretched. "But they'll do."

She lowered her vines.

Toph turned toward the chamber exit, her bare feet reading the floor with the loose confidence of something born to it, her hands finding each other behind her back.

"I hope this city will put up a good fight, she said, and something moved in her face that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite something else. "I really hope taking it down won't be easy."

She put all the teeth in the grin when she said it.

Ivy was looking forward to it too.

"Come on," Toph said, from the exit. "Batman won't find himself."

Ivy followed her into the tunnel.