And now for something completely different

[resonance_and_d]

So I've been working on this fic, with the premise that it was much more than 100 years between the time Aang was frozen and the time Katara and Sokka found him. So we have the same characters, and there's still bending, but the level of technology is at the level of present-day Earth.

And... I was doing it because I was procrastinating on my other stuff, but now it's 12000 words long and I think I'd better start posting it or I'll start losing momentum.

BUT: It is written in totally random snippets, which are not in chronological order. I'm talking 25 separate drabbles or oneshots so far. I don't think I want to post them together, but posting them all separately would result in massive spamming.

Thus... I am going to follow the format of some memes I've seen, and put the drabble-length snippets in the comments of this post. Then I'll make another post where I figure out what order everything should go in and archive it.

Confused? So am I. But I'm going to try it anyway.

Comments

Forgetting

[resonance-and-d.livejournal.com]

If hard-pressed, Toph might have admitted she didn't remember exactly what her parents' voices sounded like. She tried to imagine the arguments they'd had, the bite in her mother's tone she developed when pushed, the lullabies her father sang. And- she remembered his voice was deep when he sang, deeper than anyone would expect from his speaking voice. But she couldn't quite remember the sound of it, or the words to any of the songs.

It wasn't a big deal, she would have insisted, if anyone had asked. She didn't want to remember them. They were stupid, and they'd coddled her, and when she'd finally shown them she could deal with the world, they'd taken steps to make sure that independence wouldn't last.

She had a family now. A family she'd chosen. And that was all she needed. She never wanted to see her parents again.

But they were passing through Gaoling, and there'd been another riot. Some idiots had made bombs, and a couple of earthbender kids had gotten scared, and the whole city was a mess. What was she supposed to do? Refuse to get off the bison?

So she sucked it up and went to help. She wasn't a healer like Katara, but she could sort out the badly injured and point Katara at them, and she could get people out from under the buildings that they were trapped beneath.

The work went quickly and easily, because Toph had grown strong. The broken walls were as easy to move as pebbles. The only tricky part was making sure she didn't hurt people when she got them out from the rubble. People kept their distance from her as she worked, their hearts beating faster. But she didn't really mind. It meant she had more space to work. It didn't matter that they were afraid, not at this moment.

She saved 15 of them. She was amazing.

And then, when she'd finished pulling the last outraged citizen from the wreckage, she heard a voice behind her.

“Toph?”

And it turned out she hadn't forgotten at all. Because that was her mother's voice, and there was no way she'd ever mistake it for anyone else's.

She was tempted to run away. Which was dumb, because it wasn't like her mother could hurt her. Toph was the strongest Earthbender in the world. Possibly the strongest ever. No one could hurt her.

“What do you want?” Toph asked.

“It's me,” her mother said, with a little sob in her voice. “Your mother- I-”

“I know who you are,” Toph said, still facing the opposite direction. “What do you want?”

There was no answer for a moment. “You ran away,” her mother said after a moment. “I thought... I'm so glad to see you're safe.”

There weren't words to express how Toph felt, at that moment. Angry, yes- and sad-

“You tried to take my bending away,” she said, because what else was there to say?

“I was frightened,” her mother said quietly. “You could do such strange things, and-”

“You tried to cripple me,” Toph said. “To blind me.”

Her mother hesitated. “You're already blind.”

Toph wanted to scream. She wanted to make her mother understand what she meant.

Instead, she said: “I have people to help. Go away.”

Her mother didn't. She walked towards Toph, and grabbed her-

Toph panicked. She hit and punched and backed away until there was a safe distance between them, and only then did she realize that it had been meant as a hug.

“Keep away from me,” she said.

“I didn't mean any harm,” her mother said, and her voice was broken. “I've never meant any harm.”

Toph hated that she wasn't lying. “I hate you,” she said. And she wished that that was entirely true.

She left, walking- anywhere. Anywhere that wasn't here.

Even after all this time, Gaoling was still familiar. Her feet found the way that she'd gone a hundred times before, and she didn't even need her earthbending to know the way.

“I'm home,” she said, when she got there.

The badgermoles didn't say anything at all. She wished that people were as simple.

She curled up next to them in the silence, and hummed them a tune with no words, and tried to forget again what her mother's voice sounded like when she was sobbing.