200 word drabble: Marking Boundaries

[attackfish]

Written for avatar_500 prompt #65, Air.

Summary: She feels it around her when she walks in its emptiness.

Marking Boundaries

Toph remembered when she was very young, before she met the badger-moles or became the Blind Bandit, sitting in her window and listening to the wind blow through the trees.  She remembered hanging her feet out the window, with the ground only a few feet below her, and feeling like it was miles below instead.  She remembered the way she used to crawl, or cling to walls when she thought her mother wouldn't catch her, and she remembered feeling like nothing in the world existed except the ground underneath her feet. 

Once, after a party, where a bunch of her father's friends had all sat around and talked about the way the moon looked reflected in a pond, someone told her it was a shame she was never going to see the sky.

Aang and Katara told her that when they were on Appa, they were flying through the sky.  Aang talked about being in the temples, high up in the mountains that touched the sky, but Toph had been in the temples.  They didn't feel any different.  They all talked about the sky and how far away it was, and only Toph remembered that they all touched it, always.

Comments

[wolfs-lament.livejournal.com]

Toph is amazing. I particularly liked the image of her sitting on a windowsill unable to know how far away the ground is. Makes you remember how terrifying it must have been when she was riding Appa bareback.

ps I'm sorry I don't comment on these more often. I really like them and in future I'll put more effort into commenting as well as reading.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

And Toph, when she's scared, likes to play off the fear as mild discomfort, and make a joke out of it. She is one tough cookie, and it makes me want to hug her and say, "It's okay, you don't always have to be totally with it and brave."

Tell you the truth, I've been really bad about commenting on the avatar 500 drabbles myself...

[lalunatique.livejournal.com]

Love the idea of Toph feeling the air and sky through absence. What isn't there is as important as what is. It's always a bit of a thrill to think that different people perceive the world differently, as though there were as many different worlds as there are people--and really, there are.

This also reminded me of Touch the Sky (http://archiveofourown.org/works/347198) by amyraine, an Avatar Toph AU where she learns to airbend.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I kind of wish we had gotten to see more of the emotional associations Toph made with different "sights". She didn't have the same common vocabulary of visual symbolism. She had to make her own.

I remember that one! I always got the feeling that there were times Aang wished he could turn the tables on Toph and make her learn Airbending.

[lalunatique.livejournal.com]

Haha yes, Aang will get his revenge even if it's in an alternate universe where he's dead.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The Avatars have ways.

[c3childs.livejournal.com]

I like that, that she had a connection to Air before she did to Earth. People see her as poor, blind Toph, but she honestly fails to see her disadvantage.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I love Toph, not only Toph the unshakable, but Toph, the little girl who gets scared, and lonely, and unhappy, and comes back swinging. Toph doesn't get what the big deal is, guys!

[grandiose666.livejournal.com]

Yes--that's Toph! the whole, well-rounded Toph.

[somariel]

I like this.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[grandiose666.livejournal.com]

I really like this! I love how you explored Toph's experience of the world.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Thank you. It fascinates me. I wonder how much she managed to pass on of it to Lin.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

I think it's very interesting that Toph here is the character who remembers the sky. Toph is, well, grounded, pardon the pun.

I feel a little odd about the ending here. "They didn't feel any different. They all talked about the sky and how far away it was" is very... Toph. But "only Toph remembered that they all touched it, always" is poetic in a way I don't recall Toph ever being.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

It's not so much that she is the one who remembers the sky, so much as it doesn't occur to her that there's a difference between the air and sky.

Originally, I was going to end it "only Toph remembered they always touched it anyways." But I decided that it was okay for Toph, especially in third person, to have a little bit of poetry. I'm not as happy with it as I could be, but I'm happiest with it.

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

I remember being taught that in kindergarten. The implications didn't sink in back then. There are probably multiple fics, or at least plot points, in that idea.

There's probably something in the fact that you can look up and still see blue even when you're already in what most people would call the sky, and yet you never see it anywhere near you. But Toph isn't really the right viewpoint for that particular musing. Maybe Aang.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Or Tenzin. I want to see more Tenzin fic in the world, and it would be the kind of thing he would muse on.

[lavanyasix.livejournal.com]

The frame of reference makes sense for Toph, and does a good job of presenting her worldview as one that treats visual cues as a seeing might treat, say, telepathic ones. People can talk to Toph about the things she can't experiences, but she's still not experiencing them.

I imagine Aang must have the same experience, to a lesser degree, with everyone else's concept of stuff like "falling" and "height." The Western Air Temple best showed the different frame of reference for airbenders.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Toph's kind of strange to write, because not only is she lacking one of the senses we rely on most, but she has an extra sense. Most of the time, it's one or the other, but for Toph, it's both.

The Western Air Temple was outright dizzying. No wonder Aang thought the Air Temples were safe. I wouldn't want to tackle them, especially with no air power.

[clockwerkchaos.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I never appreciated how much writing is visual centric, both in description and in general assumptions, until I wrote a decent sized fic from Toph's perspective. Describing people, places, relative locations, all without ever using visual ques (especially during the first part, where she didn't even have her earthsense) was a challenge, and it was amazingly hard to avoid slipping into expressions or idioms that don't work.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Tell me about it. Writing Quiet Shadowed Places (the short story, not that verse) drove me absolutely batty for just that reason. And I could still use a lot of them, because Zuko had seen once upon a time and could remember it.