TDBB: Tuff Wars 2.14
The rope dug into her wrists, current running through her arms in a jagged pulse that made her teeth snap together and her spine arch against the air.
Toph hung with her toes brushing nothing, the earth a whisper below her feet that had been stripped away. She snarled and drove the sharpened edge of her shoulder plate against the cord, again.
The metal bit and the world turned white.
She came back to herself with smoke in her nose and her muscles jerking in a pattern that reminded her of a firebender's lightning, of Zuko's blue arcs and the way Sokka's traps used to leave her twitching in the dirt while he laughed and offered a hand she always refused. She hated that memory. She hated this more.
Toph ground her teeth and reached for the plate again, fingers finding the edge she'd honed in the tunnel dark, and she drove it into the rope with all the stubbornness that had carried her through eighty years of being told what she couldn't do.
The shock knocked the breath from her lungs and left her hanging limp, her mind scrambled, her sense of the world reduced to the ringing in her ears and the smell of her own hair burning.
She tried again.
And again.
Each time the current answered, and each time she came back slower, her arms trembling, her jaw set so hard she felt the strain in her temples. The rope held. The insulation inside it was a blank spot in her metal sense, a smooth sheath around something she couldn't read.
She raged against it with her mind, reaching through the copper strands to find the core, the break, the weakness that had to be there because everything had a weakness.
Nothing.
She couldn't see, and the frustration built in her chest until she was shouting, wordless, her voice cracking against the sky while she twisted and thrashed in the bind that held her above the world she needed.
Toph let her head fall back and she breathed, forcing the air through her nose, counting the heartbeats that thundered in her ears until she could sort them out: hers, racing; his, slow; the two boys, excited, young, stupid with adrenaline.
She reached for the rope again, not with the plate this time, but with her mind, tracing the weave of the fibers, the copper core that carried the current, the insulation that mocked her with its smoothness.
She found the place where the cord had been spliced. She pushed her sense into it, feeling the gap, where she could slip between and pull.
The current hit her before she could close her fingers around the thought.
She hung there, smoking, her mind scattered, and she heard Ivy's voice from somewhere far away, soft and amused and dangerous.
-0-
Ivy pushed herself up on one elbow and the dirt ground into her palms, the broken stone sharp against her skin. She looked at Batman standing over her with his cape settled around him like a judgment.
She let the air out of her lungs in a slow exhale that ended in a smile.
He didn't step back. He never did. That was the problem with him, the thing that had made their years of conflict into something that felt less like enmity and more like a ritual, a dance where the steps never changed and the music never stopped.
"You and I have had our fun," she said, and her voice came out rough, scraped by the fall, but steady underneath. "I'm tired of losing to you."
The green answered before she called it, rising through the soil in a rush that wrapped around her wrists and ankles.
The vines moved with a precision that surprised even her, lashing at the three men who surrounded her with tips that hardened to points in the space between thought and action.
They moved like they'd expected it. Batman stepped left and the vine passed through the air he'd occupied, Nightwing rolled under a second and came up with his sticks already spinning, Robin sprayed something that hissed and steamed where it touched the green. They were good. They'd always been good.
Ivy rose to her feet and the vines surged, a wall of motion that forced them back, gave her space, gave her breath, and then Batman was through the gap, his fist catching her shoulder, his weight driving her down, and the boys were on her arms, pinning her while he reached for the rope at his belt.
"You and your blind friend are going to Arkham," he said, and his hands formed the knots in patterns she recognized, the restraint settling over her wrists.
Ivy looked up at him and the green hummed in her chest, a warmth that spread through her ribs and made her smile wider.
"I wouldn't call her blind," she said.
The earth shook.
It started low, a vibration that Ivy felt through her knees before it reached her ears, and then it built, a wave of force that rolled through the ground and threw Batman sideways, that sent Nightwing sprawling and Robin tumbling across the broken stone with his staff clattering away.
The buildings nearest them groaned, a sound like giants waking from sleep, and then they began to fall, walls folding inward, roofs dropping into the hollows where the frames twisted and gave way.
Dust rose in a cloud that swallowed the light, and through it came laughter, high and wild and furious, a sound that made Ivy's heart lift in her chest because she knew that voice.
Toph rose through the chaos on a pillar of rock that tore itself from the bedrock below, her bare feet finding the stone as it lifted her, her hands still bound behind her back, her face turned toward the sound of Batman's breathing with an expression that Ivy could feel even if she couldn't see it, a mask of rage and triumph that had nothing childlike in it.
Batman rolled to his feet and his eyes found her through the dust, tracking the rope that still wrapped her wrists, the broken end where the cord had frayed and blackened.
Ivy saw him make the connection, saw his gaze snap to her and then down to the ground where vines were threading through the soil, reaching upward, finding the rope that bound her and wrapping around it with a gentle persistence that made the fibers rot and weaken.
"You," he said, and his voice carried something that might have been respect or might have been fury, the two so close in him that she'd never learned to tell them apart.
Ivy pulled her hands free and the vines caught her, lowering her to the ground with a softness that contradicted the destruction around them. She stepped onto the pillar beside Toph and reached for the knots that held her, fingers finding the weakened places where the green had done its work.
"Enjoy the new Gotham," she said to Batman, and her voice carried over the rumble of falling stone, the screams of people distant and swallowed by the dust.
Toph's wrists came loose and she brought her arms forward, rolling her shoulders, working the blood back into her fingers. She touched the frayed end of the rope and felt the rot that had freed her, the organic breakdown that had done what her metal couldn't.
"So, you can see through vines too," she said, and her voice was rough, scraped by the shocks she'd taken, but steady underneath.
"You owe me one," Ivy answered, and she could feel Toph's grin, the way it cut through the grime and the smoke and the madness of the moment. "Let's finish what we started."
They moved.
Toph drove her heel into the pillar and the stone answered, splitting into shards that shot toward the three men who were finding their feet, forcing them to dodge and roll, breaking their coordination, scattering them across the broken ground.
Ivy sent the vines after them. They grew in think mats that caught boots and tangled capes and made every step a struggle against the green that rose faster than it could be cut.
The green became endless, rising from seeds that had been planted in the dark, in the tunnels.
Toph reached into stone with her hands and will, pulling. Walls folded, roofs dropped, steel screamed as she twisted it into weights shapes, and dust rose in clouds that blotted out the sun.
Ivy's vines spread ahead of them, Toph's earth rising to meet her feet, and the city fell behind them in a wave of green and stone that left nothing standing where they passed.
The noise began to fade.
The high-frequency scream of Gotham that had been persistent against her soles dropped into a hum.
Vines rose around her, a canopy that blocked the light and softened the air, and she felt the earth beneath her breathing for the first time since she'd arrived, the slow pulse of soil and root and water that she'd forgotten in the madness of the stone.
She stopped.
The pillar carried her upward, above the green, above the dust, and she stood with the wind in her hair and the sun on her face and she felt what they'd made.
The city was a garden of broken stone and rising vine, the streets swallowed by green, the buildings wrapped in tendrils that squeezed and cracked and brought them down in slow motion.
She could feel the people through the earth, huddled in the spaces where the vines hadn't reached, or caught in the hollows where the green had grown too fast and trapped them in cages of leaf and thorn.
She reached out and touched the vine nearest her, feeling its structure through her fingers. The green opened to her mind like a flower and showed her what it saw: the people below, the fear that rose from them like heat, the way the vines answered it by growing faster, tightening, feeding on the panic they created.
Toph pulled her hand back and the connection broke, but the image stayed, the memory of what she'd felt settling into her bones like cold.
"I..." she said, and her voice was small, smaller than she'd been since she was a child in her father's garden, surrounded by walls she couldn't see and servants who spoke of her like she wasn't there.
She touched the earth beneath her, the soil that rose through the cracks in the stone, and she breathed through it, feeling the slow pulse of the deep rock.
She remembered the swamp, the roots of the Banyan-grove tree whispering about cycles and balance, and the way the ground had opened and swallowed her without asking and brought her before the Parliament of Stones.
"How dare you," she whispered, and her fingers dug into the dirt until her nails broke and the blood ran dark against the soil. "How dare you poison my mind with unrest, you mindless chunks of worthless, lifeless, coward rocks."
She stood, and the earth rose with her, the pillar carrying her higher, and she turned toward the sound of Ivy's glory, the green tower that her student had built in the center of the ruin, the vines that rose and fell like a heartbeat, strangling what remained of the city in a grip that never loosened.
"This ends now!" she shouted, and her voice cracked across the green like thunder, and she drove her fist into the stone beneath her feet and felt the bedrock answer, a wave of force that ripped through the vines and tore them from the soil, that sent Ivy's tower swaying and brought the green queen turning toward her with eyes that glowed like lanterns in the dark.
Ivy's smile faded.
Toph gathered the stone around her and leaped.
Read #2.15 in pa.treon.com/mimiclord
Thank you.