TDBB: Tuff Wars 2.16
Toph's bare soles pressed into soil, the green around her dying in patches where her will passed through the metal debris.
People moved past her toward the gaps she had opened, some leaning on others, some carrying children, and their feet made soft sounds against the dirt that replaced the stone she had shattered.
Her hands moved without thought, bending rebar into hooks that lifted fallen beams and opened hollows where the living green had trapped them. A woman clutched her arm and Toph felt the tremor in her fingers. She guided her toward the open air and turned back to the next tangle of roots.
The ground was quiet now, the screaming concrete gone, the bedrock warm and slow beneath the soil. Peace moved up through her ankles and into her hips and she understood with a clarity that opened behind her eyes -- the Parliament had not wanted her at her strongest.
A wise Toph would have recognized the screaming as their influence and ignore it. A Toph Beifong at full measure would have resisted without struggle. So, they had avoided both her prime and maturity and worn her down to her weakest self.
She reached up and touched her own shoulder, feeling the muscle there. She was barely a teenager in this form, a body held back from its own completion, a decelerated growth that left her cramped inside her own strength. A form that could easily be manipulated by rage pouring in through her feet.
Toph closed her eyes and sank into the Earth Rumble stance. She let the peace of the ground rise through her and she told her body to finish what the Parliament had interrupted. Her spine lengthened. Her shoulders broadened. She felt her hands grow heavier, the fingers widening, the calluses deepening as years of compressed potential unfolded in seconds.
She stood taller. Her tunic pulled tight across her chest and then loosened as the fabric settled on a frame that had known decades of work. She rolled her neck and felt the weight of her own skull settle into alignment with a body that had finished growing.
She opened her eyes, though they saw nothing, and she smiled.
"That's it," she said, and her voice came from a chest that held more air. "Now I'm feeling like a twenty-four-year-old again."
She raised her hand and looked at it, at the knuckles that had broken walls and the palm that had held continents of stone. The Parliament had thought they could nerf her and get away with it, stuff her into a smaller skin and point her at a city like a weapon they could control.
She turned her face toward the sky and the wind caught her hair, longer now, heavier, falling around a face that had finished becoming itself.
"Wait till I find where those cowardly rocks are hiding," she said, and she closed her fist until the knuckles ached. "I will crush them from the inside."
She turned back to the vines that still covered the eastern reach of the ruin and she threw her hand outward in a sweep that spoke to the metal buried in the collapsed buildings. The iron answered in a wave that tore through the root mat, ripping vines from the soil in a line that ran for blocks, tearing the green apart until it fell away and revealed the water beyond, the river moving slow and brown through the gap she had opened. The stone and steel groaned and settled and the last of the vines fell into the dirt with a sound like heavy rain.
People stood in the sudden open air and looked at the ruin of their homes. A man held a child and stared at a car that had been crushed by a root wider than his waist. A woman knelt in the dirt and picked up a picture frame that had been stripped of its glass. Someone sobbed behind her and Toph felt the sound in her teeth, the vibration of grief moving through the ground and into her feet.
She frowned. The metal of her shoulder plate cooled against her skin and she felt the weight of what she had done pressing down through the soles of her feet. This was her fault, partly, and the Parliament's, and Ivy's, but she had walked through this city with her hands open and her mind full of screams and she had made the destruction worse. She had torn the world open and now the people who lived in it stood in the hollow she had left behind.
Toph pressed her foot into the earth and raised both fists. The ground beneath the ruin answered. Stone rose in smooth walls from the broken foundations, arching overhead and locking together with a precision that left no gaps for wind or rain. She shaped the interiors from what remained -- beds of packed earth, hearths of stone that held warmth, walls that curved to deflect the sound of the dying city. She built shelters from the ruins, each one a small fortress of quiet stone, and she felt the weight of her power moving through her hands with a confidence that the smaller body had never held.
She turned toward the people who watched her and she pointed toward the structures with a hand that still smelled of iron and green sap.
"Take shelter," she said. "Wait until help arrives."
She moved on before they could answer, walking through the ruin with her feet reading the root systems that still pulsed beneath the soil. The scope of what she had covered struck her as she moved -- block after block of green and stone, the vines reaching deep into the infrastructure, the roots she had planted with Ivy spreading faster than she had allowed herself to understand.
She walked through it with a body that matched her will, tearing the green apart as she passed.
-0-
Batman pressed his back against the wall of a half-collapsed storefront and felt the vines testing the mortar above his head. The comm in his ear had been dead for some time, the signal swallowed by the density of the root mat and the iron in the collapsed buildings.
He had gathered several people from the apartments above, some bleeding from where the green had crushed them against doorframes, among them a child who had stopped crying and now breathed in shallow bursts that worried him. He had been trying to cut a path toward the river but the vines grew faster than he could clear them, tendrils closing the gaps behind him as soon as his ceramic blade passed through.
He held the child against his chest with one arm and used the other to keep the vines from the woman's face. The green pressed in from every side and he could hear the root mat shifting, the fibers tightening as they sensed the warmth of the bodies trapped in the hollow. He had thrown his last explosive batarang to open the initial breach and now he worked with the ceramic knife, cutting tendrils that bled sap onto his gloves and grew back while he watched.
The wall of green in front of him shuddered. The vines did not grow or retreat -- they died. The root mat tore upward from the soil in a wave that ripped toward him and passed over his head, the tendrils falling away from the wall in a cascade of severed fiber that revealed the street beyond. He saw the open air and the ruin of the block and then he saw her standing on the other side of the gap with her hand still raised and her bare feet planted in the dirt.
She looked different. Taller. Her shoulders filled the green tunic as they had not before and her hair fell around a face that had sharpened into angles he did not recognize from their previous encounters. She turned her head toward the sound of his breathing and her hand dropped to her side.
Batman shifted the child to his other arm and drew a batarang with his free hand. He threw it before she could speak, the ceramic weapon spinning through the air toward her chest.
Toph raised her left palm before her and kept her right hand behind her back. The batarang struck her open hand and she closed her fingers around it, feeling the weight and the texture.
"No need for that," she said.
She turned the weapon over in her fingers and he watched her press her thumb into the ceramic. The material softened under her touch and became sludge that dripped between her fingers before she caught it and shaped it upward, her face tilted in concentration while she listened to the material with her fingers and her mind.
She molded it into a spike, then a disc, then a shape that resembled a bird with wings too heavy to fly. She frowned at the last shape and pressed it back into a ball, working the material with a patience that suggested some part of it resisted her will.
"Huh," she said, and her voice had dropped into a register that carried more weight. "These were almost completely pure. The younger me would have never seen them coming."
She worked the sludge again and this time it moved easier, though he saw the strain in her forearm, the slight tremor where the material fought her. She shaped it into several narrow blades and she threw them with a flick of her wrist that sent them spinning into the vines to her left. They struck the root mat and exploded, the force of the blast tearing a new gap in the green that revealed more of the ruined street.
Batman shifted his weight and his free hand moved toward his belt, reaching for something hidden in the compartments there.
Toph turned her face toward him and she opened her palm again, empty now.
"What's the point of eyesight if you can't see I'm here to help?"
Batman stopped. The child in his arms stirred and he looked down at the small face before he looked back at the woman who stood with her feet in the dirt and her hand extended toward him like an offer.
"Collapsing a city and taking it hostage with vines is not helping," he said.
Toph's mouth pulled into a smirk that cut her face as it had not before, the expression of someone who had seen enough of war to find humor in the aftermath.
"Unintended mishap on my part," she said. "But I've grown since."
Batman's voice dropped into the register he used for interrogations, the low tone that made witnesses lean back without knowing why.
"Where's Ivy?"
Toph lowered her hand and she turned her face toward the sound of the river, her feet reading the root systems that still moved beneath the soil.
"Somewhere she can't cause any more trouble," she said. She turned back to him and she gestured toward the people behind him with a sweep of her arm. "I've cleared most of the vines in these parts and set up shelters for those that have been injured. Poisoned, some of them. Bruises. Symptoms that follow from being crushed by a garden that grew too fast."
She looked at the child in his arms and he saw her jaw tighten, the muscle working beneath the skin.
"They can go there," she said.
Batman remained motionless. The woman behind him held her bleeding arm against her chest and he felt the weight of the question he had not asked.
"Why?" he said.
Toph looked at him and he saw the change in her face, as the smirk faded into something harder and more honest.
"Because I want them to get help as I clear the rest of the vines," she said. "You can help."
Batman shifted the child and he looked at the people gathered behind him, their faces turned toward the woman who had opened the path. He rephrased the question, stripping it to the bone.
"Why the sudden change of heart? Ivy hadn't used her pheromones on you to begin with."
Toph looked at him for a long moment and he felt the weight of her attention, as her blind eyes seemed to read the tension in his shoulders and the hand that still hovered near his belt.
She tapped her foot against the ground and the earth answered in two directions, explosions of force that tore through the root mat and opened two paths through the ruin. One ran toward the west where the stone shelters rose in smooth walls against the broken skyline. The other ran east, cutting through the last of the vine barrier toward where he had last seen Nightwing and Robin.
"Because a mean version of me is not what you want right now," she said. She turned from him and walked toward the gap she had torn in the green, her feet finding the bedrock through the soil. "Let the people go to the shelters. You go find your friends and get them help."
She moved into the ruin without waiting for his answer, her hands rising to tear the next wall of vines from its roots. Batman stood in the open air and watched her go, the child warm against his chest, the ceramic knife in his hand. Behind him, the woman with the bleeding arm stepped forward and looked down the western path.
"If there's shelter," she said, "we should go there and wait for any help coming."
The others moved past him, drawn by the promise of walls and warmth, and he felt the current of their desperation carrying them toward the west. He had no hold on them -- they were already walking, some running, toward the stone structures that rose against the grey sky. He looked down at the child and then toward the eastern path where the vines still smoked from the force of her blast.
He shifted the child into the arms of the woman as she passed and he turned toward the east, breaking into a run that carried him through the gap and into the ruin beyond.
Read the next chapter (#2.17) in patr.eon.com/mimiclord
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