31_days | [AMNESTY DAY] [AVATAR] OLD STONE

Title: Old Stone
Day/Theme: 16 August 2010 / can you hear the distance
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Character: Toph
Rating: G

Toph dipped her feet in the hot stone of the courtyard, feeling out the palace. Once you got inside, it was hard to get a grip on the building: the Fire Nation palace was all hard wood and lacquer, paper screens just waiting to be popped full of finger-holes, sometimes a thin skimming of gold or a snaky silver inlay curving up a pillar. Wide and fiddly and smooth with age and oil, rising in flashes of metal and tall stands of basalt and marble, sheets of tiling fizzy with sunlight far above, the palace slotted itself together before her. It wasn’t somewhere she’d ever really get a feel for, she thought. But then, she didn't really want to.

The palace in Ba Sing Se had been all earthbending, scooped and shoved out of the chalky roots of the city over centuries, smooth new facades slapped up over layers of fancy antique bending, juts of crystal already sprouting in the lowest rooms. Katara had saved Aang down in the old city, deep under the palace, fuzzy with crystal and seeping water, but no-one liked to talk about that, for obvious reasons. When they got back there Toph would have to explore on her own.

She’d never caught the smallest tremor from a badger-mole anywhere in Ba Sing Se: although the top crust of the city, its streets and shops and houses, had hung precariously over its real spaces, the jostle of tunnels and cellars and caverns, pipes and cisterns, blank fans of water spreading through seams in the stone, wells dropping like plummets through to the bedrock, the heaped, crumbling houses of the catacombs, this undercity had been an old, empty place, its last true inhabitants the Dai Li in their neat little gloves and slippers, flitting here and there, from cell to cell. Sure, the trains barrelled their way down tunnels and people used their cellars and the university library took up an unreasonable amount of space, sinking down into the ground under its deadweight of scrolls, but Ba Sing Se had let its underground become like its rock, riddled with knots of old space, empty moulds left by long-ago creatures, home to sharp new growths.

Toph crunched her toes, spat. People had forgotten how to live anywhere except on the surface. You couldn’t blame them in the Fire Nation: she could feel lava, fat and sluggish, billowing slowly beneath her. Even the rock here was porous half the time, bubbly and splintering except where it abruptly sintered into something thick and glassy, stubborn with old heat. It explained a lot about the place, not that the Avatar’s sifu should say it, not nowadays at any rate. No roots. Slippery as grease, as ash.

Let one guy crouch alone in that spiky shell of wood and varnish for too long, and he lost his grip completely. It was a good thing Zuko had Knives keeping him in line when the rest of them weren’t around: you knew where you were with a girl who took such trouble to outline herself in metal. Toph spat again, smiled seraphically towards a flurry of passing courtiers. She had stuff to do here, for sure. Stuff waiting for her, she guessed, back in Gaoling. She scuffed a foot, stone fluffing up into dust around her, firmed up her stance. She’d wait, for now. And when the time came, she’d turn up in Ba Sing Se and drink tea with Uncle, and she’d listen for what the old, far distances of the city had to tell her, under her feet.