TDBB: Earth's Guardian #9.
"No," Ivy said. "Absolutely not."
"I don't see what your problem is." Toph held the skewer out. "It's one of my best roasts."
"It's rat."
"So? It's still meat." She pulled a chunk free with her teeth and chewed with the satisfaction of someone who had earned it. "Delicious."
"It's disgusting." Ivy's voice had gone somewhere between controlled and genuinely distressed. "You are disgusting."
Toph laughed, low and full, the sound bouncing off the tunnel walls. "Suit yourself."
She tore into another chunk, pulled the bones apart with her fingers, and tossed the smaller ones toward the tunnel wall, her aim confident and careless. Ivy made a sound that was working very hard not to be what it was.
"You didn't seem to have a problem when we were catching them," Toph said, around the mouthful.
"I didn't think you were actually going to eat them." A pause. "I thought it was a training exercise." Another pause, thinner. "I didn't know you were hungry. If I'd known, I could have taken you somewhere with a decent meal."
"This is decent."
"You have," Ivy said, slowly, "lowered the bar on the meaning of that word to something I don't have a measurement for." She shifted against the tunnel wall, the sound of fabric on old stone. "What are we still doing down here? We walked through half these tunnels and ended up sitting in the dark while you do -- that."
"Why else?" Toph settled back against the limestone and stretched her legs out. "We rest. Big day tomorrow."
A beat.
"You don't actually mean--"
Toph adjusted her position against the stone, found the angle where the bedrock's slow warmth came through at the right point in her spine, and let her eyes close. The tunnel breathed around her.
"You can't seriously expect me to sleep here."
Toph curled her fingers into the soil at her side, the loose earth settling between them like something familiar.
"I have a bed," Ivy said. "A real one. With a mattress. Above ground. I am going back to it."
"Good luck finding your way out."
Silence.
"What do you mean?"
"You think I walked through these tunnels without taking precautions?" Toph kept her voice easy, already half-gone toward sleep. "This place is a larger maze than when I found it. I've been adding to it since I arrived. And the ceiling on the three most direct exits is reinforced. Settling stone, very natural looking."
"That can't be--" Ivy stopped. When her voice came back it had shed some of its precision, gone slightly thinner than she probably intended. "You left some exits. Didn't you?"
"You're lucky if you find one."
The silence that followed had a different texture from the others. Toph felt Ivy's weight shift, the slow and deeply reluctant transfer of a person sitting down somewhere they had decided not to sit, and then the small sound of someone folding into themselves in the dark, arms across the chest, trying to conserve warmth from the tunnel's cool air.
A long time passed.
"Why do you hate the surface so much?"
The whisper was quiet enough that it was probably meant to stay that way, but the tunnel's old stone carried it cleanly and Toph's ears were good.
"It's loud," she said. "Irritates my feet."
Ivy absorbed that. "Is that why you want to take it down?"
"Partly." Toph turned her face toward the ceiling, feeling the deep press of the city's weight through the bedrock above her, all those millions of tons of human ambition stacked over this thin line of old honest stone. "I also think human existence peaked when people lived in forests. Hunted in them. Built with what was already growing. Technology got in the way of that."
"Humans got in their own way," Ivy said. "And in the way of everything else." Her voice had dropped into something quieter, genuine, the precision relaxed out of it by the dark and the cold and the hour. "The earth would be better without them."
"You say that," Toph said, "and your biology tells me you are human. Or you were."
A pause. "I care more about the plants."
"And you think you're the only one."
"The ones who claim to care are hypocrites. They carry signs and drive home in cars that run on the same fuel that's killing the river I was trying to clean." Her voice had an old exhaustion in it, the specific flatness of someone who has made this argument so many times it has worn a groove. "Nothing gets done."
"Your problem," Toph said, "is thinking the responsibility is yours alone." She pressed her fingers into the soil at her side, feeling the root remnants still threading through the deep stone. "Same way you force your vines instead of working with them. You think if you don't control everything it falls apart." She paused. "There are people you could lean on. If you bothered to look."
The tunnel was quiet for a long moment.
"You speak with wisdom," Ivy said, and there was something in the phrasing that wasn't quite mockery, wasn't quite sincere, lived in the narrow space between them. "Where are all your friends?"
Toph was quiet for long enough that the question might have gone unanswered.
"Far from here," she said. "And that's where I hope they stay." She shifted against the limestone, finding a better angle. "After all that time together, I failed at what mattered most."
"Which is?"
Toph turned onto her side, her cheek against the stone, and let the deep frequency of the bedrock come up through her skull.
"Get some rest," she said. "Tomorrow I teach you the proper way to bend vines."
Ivy said nothing.
Toph slept.
<--TDBB-->
Ivy did not close her eyes for hours.
She sat with her back against the tunnel wall and her arms folded across her chest and watched the dark. The dark was absolute, which was something she had not had to contend with since before the chemical accident that had changed what she was.
Even underground, even in her own chamber, she had always had the faint bioluminescence of certain fungal growths to work with, the green-grey glow of life that her changed eyes could read even in conditions no human eye could navigate.
Here there was nothing. No light source of any kind. The tunnel was a sensory void broken only by the sound of Toph breathing, which had shifted within minutes of the conversation ending into the long, even rhythm of someone genuinely and completely asleep.
On the floor.
On the tunnel floor, in the dark, in the cold, against a wall of limestone, sleeping as though it were the most natural arrangement imaginable.
Ivy had seen a great many things. She had been immune to surprise for years, or believed herself to be. She was revising that.
She told herself she was not going to sleep here. The statement was clear and firm and she maintained it for what felt like an hour, and then for what might have been less, the quality of her certainty on that question beginning to degrade around the edges in a way that was not acceptable and that she would absolutely address as soon as she was a little less cold.
The tunnel wall was solid against her spine.
That was something.
She adjusted her position -- not to get comfortable, simply to reduce the most acute points of discomfort, which was a different thing entirely and required no concession from her position that she was not going to sleep here.
She pulled her knees toward her chest and dropped her chin and focused on the sound of the tunnel, the deep and constant breath of stone that she had been ignoring in favor of resentment and was now -- not ignoring.
The rhythm of it was slower than anything above ground. Slower than the city. Slower than her own heartbeat.
She was going to find the exit. In a moment. She would stand up and find the one exit the impossible girl had left open and she would be back in her apartment before the hour was out, and this entire episode would be something she processed from the comfort of a real bed with actual pillows.
She was going to do that.
She just needed a moment.
Her eyelids made a decision without consulting her.
She didn't know when she started snoring. She knew only that she had been in the middle of a detailed internal argument about the structural ethics of sleeping on a tunnel floor when the argument stopped, and the tunnel continued, and the dark was -- warmer than she had thought, actually, down close to the floor where the stone held the heat of the deep earth, and the soil was -- she had spent two months cultivating soil, she knew what good soil felt like, and this was -- this was--
"Wake up."
The voice arrived before the situation did.
"Wake up, knucklehead."
Ivy's hand came up to defend against something that wasn't there, her body already in the logic of a threat before her mind had finished assembling where she was and what was happening. She got to her feet with the decisive energy of someone who had definitely not been asleep.
"I wasn't sleeping," she said.
"No," Toph agreed. "You didn't look comfortable at all."
Ivy became aware of several things in sequence. She was standing. Her suit had a crease along the left side consistent with extended contact with a flat surface. There was a faint impression of tunnel floor texture along her left cheek, which she was not going to address or acknowledge.
She was also, and this was the part that required the most processing, standing in the approximate center of the tunnel rather than against the wall where she had not been sleeping, which meant at some point in the not-sleeping she had moved.
She had been sprawled on the wet ground like it was a mattress.
The sound that came out of her was not one she was proud of. She straightened her suit and lifted her chin and was very much in control of her responses.
"Keep quiet," Toph said, and her voice had changed register entirely -- flat, focused, the easy humor gone out of it. She was already on her feet, already in the wide stance that Ivy had learned to recognize as operational.
"What--"
"Shh." One hand raised, not looking at her, not looking at anything. "Let me listen."
Ivy went quiet.
She watched Toph's feet shift against the tunnel floor, the weight transferring through her soles with an intentionality that had nothing casual in it. Whatever she was reading, she was reading it completely, with the full attention of something built for exactly this purpose.
The tunnel was silent around them. Ivy heard nothing. Not a sound beyond the distant drip of condensation and the baseline hum that she had stopped registering as separate from the silence hours ago.
Toph's jaw moved slightly, the muscles working, reading something through her feet that had no equivalent in anything Ivy could access.
"Deliberate movement," Toph said, barely above a breath. "Quiet and controlled. Someone who is trying to be here without being heard." A pause. "Someone who wants to find me."
Ivy looked into the dark of the tunnel. "Could be a rat."
The flatness of the look Toph turned on her, sightless and precise, communicated an entire response without words.
"I know where the rats are," Toph said. "I always know where the rats are." She turned back to whatever she was reading through the floor, her weight dropping slightly lower in the stance. "I know who this is."
"Who?"
"Grumpy-gull."
Ivy blinked. "Who?"
"Trouble," Toph said. She rolled her shoulder -- the injured one, Ivy noted, the motion deliberate, testing -- and the salvage armor settled back into place against it. She turned toward the tunnel.
"I hope you rested well," Toph said.
Ivy opened her mouth.
"Your lessons start now."
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