Chapter 30.3- And so the Dragons Danced

“Enough about that. How does the metal feel?” I asked.

“Still dead. Metal bending is impossible, Natsu. I know you think there’s something there but I can tell you there isn’t.” She said in reply. I just nodded. It had come to me while I bathed at the stream earlier today that the reason Toph was having difficulty with the metal itself was because she hadn’t started out with metal in canon. She’d started with the space rock. That got her sensitivity to smaller particles of earth to high enough level that she could feel the earth within metal. When she’d been stuck in a metal cell with Katara at an earlier point, she hadn’t been able to do anything. There just wasn’t enough experience in her yet.

Since I had no idea how to get said space rock, Toph and I were definitely going to have to move to something else.

“What do you think about lava?” I asked her.

“What is lava?” She asked instantly back, rolling the unfamiliar word across her tongue as it testing the taste of it. I just sighed and changed the cloud I was looking at while I tried to come up with a description for lava that would make sense to a blind girl.

“Well, it’s what you’d get if you heated a stone until it became a sludge like liquid thing. Like molten rock.” I said to her.

“Like metal in the forge?” She asked with an adorable twist to her lips.

“Precisely. Precisely like that”

“So what happened to it”

“Do you think you could bend it?”

“I don’t even know what it really is” She said, and I nodded in understanding.

A description would not be enough. I had to actually get her to experience or rather feel it for herself. Thankfully, the Fire Nation had no shortage of active volcanoes. A leave for a brief holiday with my ’daughter’ after taking Ba Sing Se shouldn’t be that hard. Especially since taking Ba Sing Se itself would mean an end to much of the war. It would leave the Northern Water Tribe and a few smaller cities in the Earth Kingdom as the last bastions of resistance. It was shocking that we were at the precipice of achieving Sozin’s dream.

“Fair. Just keep practicing your bending then”

“I want to spar” She said instead.

“You’ll lose”

“I’ll make you eat those words” She said, making me chuckle and push myself to my feet.

“Let’s go then”

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In the end, we didn’t even need to reach Chen’s walls for me to be certain that my plan had worked. Out from the city rode a small company of men, flying the Fire Nation insignia on a banner above them.

“Toji, Maki, Lin come with me” I ordered as I spurred my own horse forward to meet them halfway. I could see Toph pouting at being excluded but I had no desire in flaunting her in the face of a military officer who could possibly outrank me and who I would definitely not know. The risk was too great.

We met the other force at the half way line, and I was smiling before the leader even took off his helmet.

“General Sung, it is a pleasure to meet you again” I said to him.

“Not as much as it is to see you alive, well, and so successful, Natsu. Or I guess that would be General Natsu now” He said, taking out a scroll from his satchel and tossing it at me.

A/N: WIP