TDBB: Tuff Wars 2.18
Toph's fingers closed around the grapple line and she pulled, bending the metal core until it curved toward the belly of the plane above her.
She climbed hand over hand, her cut ankle trailing blood that whipped away in the wind, and she hauled herself through an opening in the plane.
Her bare feet hit the floor and the it swayed, a heavy shift that sent vibration through the metal frame and into her soles, a dead spot in her earth sense that made her reach for the wall to steady herself. She found the panel and pressed her palm flat, reading the alloy, the rivets, the hollow spaces where fuel lines ran and electronics hummed.
"When did she get so huge?" Robin said, the words coming out low and sharp, and Toph turned her face toward the sound of his breathing, toward the two boys standing behind the man at the console.
Toph's mouth pulled at one corner. "Changed your mind, Grumpy?"
Batman did not turn from the controls. "This isn't the courtesy you think it is."
"Good." Toph pushed off the wall and felt the plane sway again, her weight settling into the adult frame that still surprised her with its reach. "I wasn't going to thank you anyway."
She turned her head, reading the space through air displacement and the hum of machinery, the two boys breathing hard before her, the man at the front with his heart beating slow and steady. "How do I get off this thing?"
"You're not getting off." Batman's voice carried over the rotors without rising. "You're going to help us undo what you've caused."
Toph folded her arms across her chest and felt the metal of her shoulder plate press against her ribs, the salvage armor sitting heavy on a frame that had outgrown its original measurements. "Already undid my part. The rest is all Ivy. She's the one you should be talking to."
She paused and tilted her head, the smirk returning. "You should be grateful you don't have to deal with me anymore."
Batman's hands stopped moving across the console. She felt the shift in his weight, the slight turn of his shoulders, and then the silence that followed had a weight to it, a pressure that pressed against her ears. "You can't see it, but Ivy is taking over Gotham with her vines as we speak."
"All of it at once."
"So cut all the vines down. It's your city. Your Ivy. Not really my problem anymore." Toph threw her hands out, palms open, the gesture loose and careless.
"She has never been able to do this before." Batman's voice dropped, gravel scraping stone. "Not on an entire city-wide scale."
Toph's hands hovered in the air, the pose of someone ready to deflect something that had not yet arrived. "I did make her angry. Can't blame her for throwing a tantrum. But I still don't see how it's my problem."
Batman turned from the console and she felt his eyes on her. "Is that really all you did?"
Toph's hands lowered to her sides. She felt the memory arrive without invitation, the two of them walking the network beneath the city and planting what they had planned to harvest. The seeds, the training, the thirty days.
"I don't like where this is going," she said.
"You spent a month together orchestrating this chaos." Batman's boots scraped the cabin floor, closing distance she had not invited him to close. "Now that you've grown a conscience, you're going to help clean it."
Toph's fist struck the wall of the plane and the metal rang. The rotters shuddered, the whole craft tilting under the impact while the two boys stumbled and caught themselves on handholds she could not see. She did not move. Her feet had found their grip and her stance held her steady while the world tilted around her.
"Stop with your pitch." Her voice came from a chest that held more air than the body she had worn yesterday, but she heard the thinness in it. "It won't get me to take any responsibility."
Batman's fists clenched.
"But this is your world." She spread her hands. "And you seem resourceful. How about we strike a deal instead?"
"The only deal you're getting is a reduced sentence in Arkham."
Toph laughed, a short sound that scraped her throat. "Last I checked, you're the one who pulled me into a metal bird that I can fold in half, land, and escape without any struggle." She stepped toward the sound of his breathing, the blood from her ankle leaving small wet sounds where her sole pressed the floor. "You're the one who needs to be reasonable here, Grumpy."
Silence. Then his voice came lower than before. "What do you want?"
"Help finding a bunch of rocks that brought me here." Toph turned her face toward the window, though the glass meant nothing to her. "They call themselves the Parliament of Stones. Get me to them, I go back to my swamp, and you never see me again." She paused and felt the plane leveling out, the rotors finding their rhythm, the boys behind her breathing in patterns that spoke of anger held in check. "Then I will help you stop Ivy."
"How?"
Toph's grin returned. "How else? Knock some sense into her. She tends to listen when I rough her up properly."
-0-
"You're serious." Nightwing's voice came from her left, sharp and rising, the words carrying the edge of someone who had watched his city torn open and could not believe the conversation had turned to negotiation. "We should cuff her and hand her over. She flattened a district. She worked with Ivy for a month. You can't seriously --"
"She's our best lead." Batman did not turn from the console, his hands moving again in patterns that spoke of navigation and calculation and the acceptance of necessary evils. "And the only one who understands what Ivy has become."
"She's what Ivy became!" Robin's voice cracked, the high note of a boy who had taken a boulder to the chest and still felt the bruise with every breath. "She trained her. This is their mess and we're letting her --"
"Enough." The word came out flat and final, and Toph felt the silence that followed, the two boys holding their breath, the anger in the cabin air thick enough to taste.
Batman turned from the console and she felt his eyes on her again, reading the stance she held, the blood pooling beneath her foot, the way her shoulders had started to drift forward though she forced them back. "Let me look at that."
Toph looked down at her ankle though she could not see it, feeling the wet warmth where the vine had wrapped and torn, the poison moving through her blood in a slow current she could track as a faint tingling in her calf. "No need. It'll close by itself."
"I get your need to be independent." Batman's boots moved across the cabin floor and she felt him stop an arm's length away, close enough to touch, close enough to strike. "That wound is poisoned. The vines that cut you carry toxins that will shut down your nervous system if they reach your heart."
Toph's laugh came out weaker than she intended, a breathy sound that barely carried over the rotors. "I've eaten worse."
She felt the dizziness arrive as a pressure behind her eyes, a loosening in her knees that she covered by shifting her weight, pressing her shoulder against the cabin wall and letting the metal take some of the load.
Her hand found the panel again and she gripped the edge, fingers bending the metal until it bit into her palm, the pain anchoring her to consciousness.
"She's swaying," Robin said, the words carrying a satisfaction she did not have the energy to resent.
"I'm fine." Toph pushed off the wall and her legs betrayed her, the cut ankle folding, her shoulder striking the cabin floor with a sound that rang through the metal hull and made the plane shudder again. She lay on her back and stared at a ceiling she could not see, the rotors beating above her in a rhythm that seemed to slow with each pulse of blood through her ears.
Batman's voice came from somewhere to her right, low and directed at the boys. "Help her up."
She felt hands on her shoulders, the smaller grip of the boy she had buried under stone, the larger hands of the one whose sticks she had scattered across a ruined street. She twisted and threw her elbow, felt it connect with something soft, and the hands withdrew with curses she did not bother to parse.
"I said help her, not fight her." Batman's voice again, closer now, and she felt his shadow fall across her though she could not see it, the displacement of air as he knelt. "You're going to die from stubbornness before the poison gets you."
"Not..." Toph's tongue felt thick in her mouth, the word slurring as she rolled onto her side and pushed herself up on one elbow, the cabin spinning in a darkness that had never bothered her before because darkness was her native country. "Not your problem."
She reached for the metal of the cabin wall and pulled, feeling the alloy respond to her will, bending and wrapping around her arm, her shoulder, her torso, a shell of riveted steel that closed over her chest and sealed her in a cocoon of her own making. The plane tilted hard, the sudden shift of metal mass throwing the rotors off balance, and she heard Batman curse as he lunged for the console.
"Bending the metal in this plane will cause us to crash."
Toph's voice echoed from inside the shell, muffled and distant even to her own ears. "Not my problem."
She felt the plane leveling, Batman's hands on the controls, the two boys breathing in patterns that spoke of fury and fear in equal measure. The metal pressed against her wound, cold and solid, and she let her head fall back against the shell she had built, the darkness inside darker than any she had known because it carried no vibration, no earth, no sense of the world beyond the alloy that held her.
"Why do we have to put up with her?" Robin's voice, from somewhere beyond the shell, carrying the whine of a child who had been told to endure something he could not understand.
"We'll be in the cave soon." Batman's voice came back flat, controlled, the rhythm of a man who had already moved past the argument and into the next phase of his planning. "Get ready."
Toph heard his boots move across the cabin, the shift of weight as he settled into the pilot's seat, the tapping of fingers on a console that spoke of screens and data and the particular desperation of a man who had run out of good options. She lay in her metal shell and felt the poison moving through her blood, a slow tide she could not bend, could not fight, could only endure as the plane carried her toward whatever came next.
Toph closed her eyes inside her shell and let the rotors carry her into darkness. It banked hard and she felt the shift in her stomach, the metal shell pressing against her ribs, the wound in her ankle throbbing in time with the rotors.
Batman's voice came low, directed at his boys, low enough that she had to strain to hear it through the shell. "Our best chance at figuring this out is using the Blind Bandit. She's planned this destruction with Ivy. We need her to cooperate."
Toph's mouth pulled into a smile inside the darkness of her shell.
The plane descended, the rotors changing pitch, and she felt the vibration of the city rise to meet them, the green pulse stronger now, the garden reaching upward with roots that had learned to hunger from the mind of a woman who had been abandoned one time too many.
Toph held her breath and let the metal carry her down.
A/N:
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