Shortfic: Bring the Sky Down to Earth

[attackfish]

Disclaimer: If I owned Avatar: the Last Airbender, I would have the money to donate to charity myself.

Summary: Toph may be the Avatar who took down Firelord Ozai, but she still has one element left to master.

Author's Note: Written for tumblr user daemonicblackcat as a reward for donating ten dollars to RAICES, a charity that aids immigrants and refugees coming to the US and are fighting Trump's crimes against humanity. They wanted a fic about either Toph or Zuko. You know how I keep saying I could have sworn I wrote a fic about Avatar Toph reluctant to study airbending? Well now I've written it. Other installments in this universe can be found at the tag, "#Earth Avatar Toph universe": [Link].

Warnings: None


Bring the Sky Down to Earth

Toph could feel the earth falling away mere feet from her, but worse, she could feel just how far down it went. And because that wasn't bad enough, the wind hammering the cliffsides reverberated up to her, leaving strange, wispy traces in the stones' vibrations. "You people are crazy."

She cocked her head. Toph didn't know which sister she was, just that she wasn't Ty Lee. "Don't you want to see if you can do it?"

"No way, my feet belong on the ground." In fact, sitting down to put as much of her body as close as possible to the ground seemed like a great idea.

"You go on boats," she pointed out.

Toph gave in and sank down to the stone, folding her legs beneath her. "Metal boats. Still earth."

Ty Lee's feet touched down, feather like, on the cliffside. "So do you think you might want to fly like that yourself someday?"

"No!" Toph burst out, and before she realized what she was doing, she was on her feet and running for the safety of the renovated temple.

Neither of them came after her, not Ty Lee, nor her sister, who Toph still didn't know which one she was. She was probably ever going to learn, and that was just one more reason this place sucked. They all walked around, their feet hitting the ground the exact same way, causing the exact same echoes of their presence, who all sounded the same, and moved the same, and asked her the same annoying questions. They didn't feel real, and they made the temple around them feel fake too.

The hanging buildings of the temple itself were made of brick, plaster, and clay tiles, like cocoons of earth. Toph slumped down against the wall and concentrated on the way vibrations changed between the rock and the walls, and the roof tiles under the floor. Her breath slowed, and the shape of the temple complex unfurled in her mind. People and bison touched down and took off outside like oversized birds, or walked across the stone courtyards below. On the cliff above them, a herd of deer-cats were resting together in the sun. In the ceiling corner, spider-fly hung suspended from its web, kept rooted to the earth by a thin strand of silk.

She could feel Ty Lee coming closer. She could leave before Ty Lee found her if she wanted to. The air went in though her nose and out through her mouth. In through her nose, out through her mouth.

When the knock came, she waited a few moments before she answered. "I don't see why I have to learn airbending anyway. I already beat the Firelord."

"I guess it's not like I can make you if you don't want to." Ty Lee rolled her shoulders in a graceful shrug. "But I never thought you were the kind of person to give up like this just because you're scared."

"Give up on what?" she yelled, sounding humiliatingly defensive even to her own ears. "I don't want to airbend."

"Because you're scared," Ty Lee shot back cheerfully. "Your aura is all yellowy gray."

"I don't know what that means, and I don't care."

"You're going to be known as the Avatar who never learned how to airbend," Ty Lee told her. "Just think, they'll be telling stories about you for the next ten thousand years."

"They'll be telling stories about how I defeated the Fire Nation and invented metalbending instead," she shot back. "No one's going to care about anything else."

"You're probably right." She sat down on Toph's bedroll. "You know, I never thought it was a coincidence that I found a whole herd of sky bison while I was supposed to be hunting you, or that it was me who found them. I mean, what are the odds? Someone from a secret airbending family with no idea how to airbend finds a herd of airbending animals that haven't been seen for a hundred years?"

Toph stood over her, glowering. "Do you have a point?"

Smiling, Ty Lee shook her head. The minute changes in how somebody's body felt against the ground depending on what expression they wore were so much harder to distinguish when a person was moving, but Ty Lee was always smiling. Toph knew exactly what it felt like. "I just think it's really cool that we both got to learn to bend from the original benders. That's something we have in common. I think it's really special."

"Zuko learned from the dragons," she pointed out.

"Yeah." Ty Lee beamed. "We've almost got a little club."

"Yeah, okay. Sure."

"Did you know the sky bison have two coats? On the bottom, they've got a thick fluffy coat that keeps them warm, but on top, the coat is wiry, and each hair has a wide blade on it to catch the wind." She passed a hair over to Toph for her to examine it. "The air turns the hairs, which lets the bison feel precisely what the air around them is doing."

"Airbending is nothing like earthbending," Toph said coldly. "So you can stop trying to convince me they are."

"When you're up there," Ty Lee continued as if she hadn't heard. "You can't rely on your eyes. You have to feel the wind and how it's moving."

Toph shuddered. "If I agree to train, will you shut up about flying?"

Ty Lee laughed.

"It's not funny!" She folded her arms sulkiky, feeling like a little child, and not like the person who took down Firelord Ozai. "And I'm not going flying."

"Great!" she crowed, hands clasping together. But then, she reined herself in. "You don't have to if you don't want to, I guess," she finished magnanimously.

"I don't."

"That's okay!" Ty Lee assured her, fidgeting giddily. "There's so much more to airbending than that!" She shot to her feet and seized Toph in a hug.

Toph fought not to squirm. "There better be."