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

[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.