Benjamin Russell (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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om_main2013-01-24 06:07 am
om_shatterstar) wrote in om_main2013-01-24 06:07 am
Entry tags:
Toph and Benjamin (backdated to January 24th)
Toph and Benjamin meet in the gym and quickly find their way to mutual interests and bad decisions.
Backdated to January 24th.
The gymnasium was rarely completely empty but, with the hours that he kept, the phenomenon wasn't entirely unfamiliar to Benjamin and it never took him long to lose track of the silence and the stillness that surrounded him once he began to train. Whether it was beating through the latest replacement punching bag, practicing the acrobatic tricks he'd learned from his roommate, or attempting to wrangle his self-taught sword techniques into those of a proper fencer, he approached such efforts with intense focus. The sort of focus which could only be learned one way and could never be forgotten, especially not with the students abuzz with anxious words about mutant exposure and impending threats. Not that he didn't have other reasons to come. The exertion still made him feel more like himself than anything.
Coming out of a turn, his kick struck the heavy bag with enough force to make it swing and the chains groan. An exhalation of breath and effort followed, then he turned, bringing another set of punches into the bag and causing it to swing back...a sound which easily masked that of the distant opening door.
She was getting used to finding other people in the gym these days, but very few of them ever did anything like the guy who was in there now. It made Toph stop for a moment to follow the motions -- she couldn't have said what style the kid was using but she knew skill when it danced in front of her.
Of course, what she said was a loud, "Not bad."
Benjamin stopped, caught the bag with one outstretched hand as it swung back, and turned to look at Toph. It was a big voice for such a small girl and he tilted his head, taking in her lean figure and young face and colorless eyes with a measure of consideration. "No," he agreed after several moments of silence, his monotone at odds with the intensity that had characterized his movements, "But not good enough." His hand dropped to his side and he continued to observe the girl. "Do you need it?" he asked, not certain why else she would've spoken to him.
"It's fine if you're still using it," Toph said with a dismissive wave. "I can wait. There's just not that many people around who actually know what they're doing with it."
"You can tell?" There was a touch of curiosity in that voice now. Benjamin had noticed her eyes; hard to miss when both of them had the same milky appearance as the one planted in his own left socket. He didn't know whether or not she was completely blind, but if his experience told him anything it was that her vision was limited. Extremely limited. He wondered how she managed to orient herself, let alone evaluate his performance, and it never occurred to him to avoid the matter.
"Yeah," she said slowly, with the tone of voice that implied a duh was left off the end. "You move like you know what you're doing. It's pretty easy to read," Toph finished, just a hint smugly.
"You can't see," Benjamin pointed out, seeming either immune or oblivious to her sarcasm. Hypothetically, he could understand. Within a certain proximity there was a sense of awareness that people could have with one another even without vision. He'd experienced it before when an opponent had maneuvered into his blind spot or his vision had been otherwise compromised. But not from across a room. "You can read me from this distance?" There was no pretense; the boy sounded, in his muted way, impressed.
"Yeah, if you're touching the floor." Toph had been explaining it to people for weeks as she hadn't gotten any more elegant about it. Who cared how it worked, so long as it did? "Something to do with vibrations, I dunno."
Normally, Benjamin would have agreed with her, but in this case it did matter. At least for him. He considered the words she'd provided as an imitation answer, wondered how much this interpretation of vibrations had to do with her mutant abilities, then decided to ask anyway. "Can you teach me?"
"Teach you what?" She considered it for a moment before tracing the conversation back to what she'd just said. "The vibration thing? I don't think so. It has to do with my power."
Disappointed but resigned, Benjamin nodded to himself and said aloud for Toph, "Right." He pushed the heavy bag absently, watched it swing and listened to it creak, then stepped back. "You should use it, if that's what you came for. I broke the last one. I will use the bars." Besides, he was curious to see how the girl moved and how well reading vibrations through the floor actually worked. "Do you also," he paused, searching for the words she had used and echoing them once he found them, "'Know what you're doing'?"
"If you mean fighting, then yeah," she said as if it should have been obvious, and made her way over to where she was pretty sure the bang hung. "And why would you want to know, anyway? You can see, right?"
Held by curiosity, Benjamin didn't immediately move toward the bars and he peered at the girl, waiting for something to happen. A step back in the conversation wasn't what he'd expected, but he answered automatically. "Sort of."
Toph paused in the middle of bouncing on the balls of her feet. "What's that mean?" She asked, turning her head in his general direction.
Out of habit, Benjamin touched his face, traced the tattoo of the star around his muted eye. "One of my eyes works, the other doesn't," he supplied simply and dropped his hand, "Not right."
"Oh," she said, followed by a simple, "Sorry."
Benjamin caught himself before asking her why. Alison had told him; sometimes people said 'sorry' out of sympathy, even when the problem had nothing at all to do with them. It still seemed strange and misplaced to him, but at least he understood the girl's meaning. "You're kind," he responded.
"I'm really not," Toph said with a wide grin aimed in his direction. But she considered the space in front of her and the boy to the side and turned completely towards Benjamin instead. "So hey, are you done? Do you want to spar instead?"
Not certain whether the point was something he needed to push, Benjamin was still silent by the time Toph turned to face him, smiling as she sent the conversation into unanticipated territory. He wasn't done, he typically remained in the gym until he began to feel the burn of exertion and he was nowhere close to that point, but that didn't seem to be what she was actually asking. "You want to fight?" he responded, sounding numb to the idea at first, though he knew what she meant. Sparring was the sort of fighting where the goal was not to conquer, just to outmaneuver. Where the participants might come out with bruises, but not broken bones or serious injury. He wondered if it qualified as a 'sport', like fencing did.
His eyes flicked downward, then up again, and he looked at the blind girl. "I would like the practice," he confirmed finally, "Yes."
There was something weird about his reactions, but with everything muffled through the wood floor it was hard for Toph to pick out exactly what bothered her. But he had agreed after all, and that was all it took for her to abandon the bag entirely, her grin widening into something filled with teeth. "Awesome," she said as she stopped in front of him, bouncing slightly on her toes again.
Benjamin had never encountered someone so happy to be entering a fight and and her intense enthusiasm made his doubt wane. He stepped back into a stance that was more firmly rooted than Toph's, his muscles poised to move. "Awesome," he mimicked in response, using her word because his own words and his own expressions (not that she could've seen them anyway) would have come up short. He watched her and began to move slowly, waiting until he had a sense of her rhythm before he shooting forward, opening the fight with a turning kick that started low but rose swiftly, aiming for her stomach.
Toph blocked it, trying to use his momentum to throw him off balance, and the fight was on. Not full force of anything like it, but she had to hold back a lot less than she thought, especially given how hard Benjamin could hit. Someday, she was going to get him onto the ground outside, and it was going to be amazing.
By the time she skidded to a stop, Toph was breathing hard, slightly bruised, and grinning hard enough to break her face. "That was awesome," she declared.
Benjamin wasn't breathing hard, a benefit of superhuman endurance, but the sheen of sweat on his brow and the alert expression he wore precluded the impression that the fight had been easy. The girl moved with admirable precision and a style that his own self-taught heavy-handedness prevented him from knowing, but which he was beginning to understand; she was a strong opponent. Her declaration seemed to mark the end of their skirmish and he stepped back, finally wiping the sweat away with the heel of his hand. "You would do well in the arena," he said, his words transformed into agreement only by his tone, "But I like fighting you here instead."
"Arena?" Toph echoed curiously, shifting absently as she came down from the adrenaline rush of the fight. "You mean like a tournament?"
"No." The answer was concise and without elaboration; mostly because it didn't occur to Benjamin to offer any. Instead, he asked, "What is your name?"
Right, this guy was weird. But also kind of awesome, so Toph just shrugged. "Toph," she said with a firm nod.
"Toph," Benjamin answered, repeating her name like an unfamiliar word and nodding in return, "I'm Benjamin. It's nice to meet you." The words still sounded like a script he was reading despite the fact that, in this case, it was true. He hadn't expected to find someone to practice with here and he'd never been able to approach the topic with Laura because she was too much like him. Fighting with her would never feel like 'sparring'. But then this girl had come into the gym and made the proposition. She'd even had the skills to back it up, though she'd held them in check. He was glad that he'd met her.
"You too," Toph said cheerfully enough, slowly getting used to his strange inflections. Maybe that would make more sense when she got him outside, but for the time being, it was fine. "We should do that again some time."
"Yes." A note of genuine (if subdued) enthusiasm came through on that monosyllabic response. Hearing it himself, Benjamin tensed and thought about it and decided it was probably all right. He looked forward to fencing with Kurt too and his roommate had assured him that had been acceptable. "I'm here," he provided after a considerable pause, "Often."
"Me too," Toph grinned, picking the tone of his voice out easily enough. Hell yeah, she was going to do this as often as she could. It wasn't like being back with the class, but it some ways it was almost better. Benjamin wasn't going to give her any quarter, even if she'd wanted it. "So that works. Anything else you wanna try?"
"Try?" Benjamin echoed with complete non-comprehension, his head angling slightly to one side. He attempted to put it together but came up blank, not knowing what sort of activity was supposed to follow combat practice between near strangers. But there was one way to find out and he didn't want to disappoint Toph besides. "Yes," he agreed.
"Okay..." she said slowly. It occasionally seemed like they were having two completely different conversations, but Toph sometimes felt like that with a lot of people. "Like what? Some other style or something?"
Hearing what Toph meant aloud and elaborated on, it made sense. But there was one problem. Benjamin lowered his head for a moment, thinking about what that meant, then answered, "I don't know 'styles'. I was not taught." That word, however, seemed to spark a thought and he added almost without pause, "Kurt has been teaching me to fence. Do you fence?"
"What, like with swords and stuff? Never done it. I like hand to hand better." But Toph's eyebrows drew together a little as she thought. Even she could agree that putting something sharp in her hands probably wasn't the best idea ever, but with Benjamin's reflexes it might not matter. "I could try, though," she said, only a little dubiously.
A faint smile twitched at the edges of Benjamin's lips without any effort at all. Something about the idea of passing on what his friend had taught him genuinely appealed to him and he turned abruptly to fetch the equipment from where he'd placed it along the wall. "When you become accustomed to a weapon," he reassured her, talking matter-of-factly as he moved, "It is an extension of the body. You'll pick it up quickly."
"If you say so," Toph snorted, absently turning her head to follow his movements. "But if you end up getting stabbed, don't say I didn't warn you."
Backdated to January 24th.
The gymnasium was rarely completely empty but, with the hours that he kept, the phenomenon wasn't entirely unfamiliar to Benjamin and it never took him long to lose track of the silence and the stillness that surrounded him once he began to train. Whether it was beating through the latest replacement punching bag, practicing the acrobatic tricks he'd learned from his roommate, or attempting to wrangle his self-taught sword techniques into those of a proper fencer, he approached such efforts with intense focus. The sort of focus which could only be learned one way and could never be forgotten, especially not with the students abuzz with anxious words about mutant exposure and impending threats. Not that he didn't have other reasons to come. The exertion still made him feel more like himself than anything.
Coming out of a turn, his kick struck the heavy bag with enough force to make it swing and the chains groan. An exhalation of breath and effort followed, then he turned, bringing another set of punches into the bag and causing it to swing back...a sound which easily masked that of the distant opening door.
She was getting used to finding other people in the gym these days, but very few of them ever did anything like the guy who was in there now. It made Toph stop for a moment to follow the motions -- she couldn't have said what style the kid was using but she knew skill when it danced in front of her.
Of course, what she said was a loud, "Not bad."
Benjamin stopped, caught the bag with one outstretched hand as it swung back, and turned to look at Toph. It was a big voice for such a small girl and he tilted his head, taking in her lean figure and young face and colorless eyes with a measure of consideration. "No," he agreed after several moments of silence, his monotone at odds with the intensity that had characterized his movements, "But not good enough." His hand dropped to his side and he continued to observe the girl. "Do you need it?" he asked, not certain why else she would've spoken to him.
"It's fine if you're still using it," Toph said with a dismissive wave. "I can wait. There's just not that many people around who actually know what they're doing with it."
"You can tell?" There was a touch of curiosity in that voice now. Benjamin had noticed her eyes; hard to miss when both of them had the same milky appearance as the one planted in his own left socket. He didn't know whether or not she was completely blind, but if his experience told him anything it was that her vision was limited. Extremely limited. He wondered how she managed to orient herself, let alone evaluate his performance, and it never occurred to him to avoid the matter.
"Yeah," she said slowly, with the tone of voice that implied a duh was left off the end. "You move like you know what you're doing. It's pretty easy to read," Toph finished, just a hint smugly.
"You can't see," Benjamin pointed out, seeming either immune or oblivious to her sarcasm. Hypothetically, he could understand. Within a certain proximity there was a sense of awareness that people could have with one another even without vision. He'd experienced it before when an opponent had maneuvered into his blind spot or his vision had been otherwise compromised. But not from across a room. "You can read me from this distance?" There was no pretense; the boy sounded, in his muted way, impressed.
"Yeah, if you're touching the floor." Toph had been explaining it to people for weeks as she hadn't gotten any more elegant about it. Who cared how it worked, so long as it did? "Something to do with vibrations, I dunno."
Normally, Benjamin would have agreed with her, but in this case it did matter. At least for him. He considered the words she'd provided as an imitation answer, wondered how much this interpretation of vibrations had to do with her mutant abilities, then decided to ask anyway. "Can you teach me?"
"Teach you what?" She considered it for a moment before tracing the conversation back to what she'd just said. "The vibration thing? I don't think so. It has to do with my power."
Disappointed but resigned, Benjamin nodded to himself and said aloud for Toph, "Right." He pushed the heavy bag absently, watched it swing and listened to it creak, then stepped back. "You should use it, if that's what you came for. I broke the last one. I will use the bars." Besides, he was curious to see how the girl moved and how well reading vibrations through the floor actually worked. "Do you also," he paused, searching for the words she had used and echoing them once he found them, "'Know what you're doing'?"
"If you mean fighting, then yeah," she said as if it should have been obvious, and made her way over to where she was pretty sure the bang hung. "And why would you want to know, anyway? You can see, right?"
Held by curiosity, Benjamin didn't immediately move toward the bars and he peered at the girl, waiting for something to happen. A step back in the conversation wasn't what he'd expected, but he answered automatically. "Sort of."
Toph paused in the middle of bouncing on the balls of her feet. "What's that mean?" She asked, turning her head in his general direction.
Out of habit, Benjamin touched his face, traced the tattoo of the star around his muted eye. "One of my eyes works, the other doesn't," he supplied simply and dropped his hand, "Not right."
"Oh," she said, followed by a simple, "Sorry."
Benjamin caught himself before asking her why. Alison had told him; sometimes people said 'sorry' out of sympathy, even when the problem had nothing at all to do with them. It still seemed strange and misplaced to him, but at least he understood the girl's meaning. "You're kind," he responded.
"I'm really not," Toph said with a wide grin aimed in his direction. But she considered the space in front of her and the boy to the side and turned completely towards Benjamin instead. "So hey, are you done? Do you want to spar instead?"
Not certain whether the point was something he needed to push, Benjamin was still silent by the time Toph turned to face him, smiling as she sent the conversation into unanticipated territory. He wasn't done, he typically remained in the gym until he began to feel the burn of exertion and he was nowhere close to that point, but that didn't seem to be what she was actually asking. "You want to fight?" he responded, sounding numb to the idea at first, though he knew what she meant. Sparring was the sort of fighting where the goal was not to conquer, just to outmaneuver. Where the participants might come out with bruises, but not broken bones or serious injury. He wondered if it qualified as a 'sport', like fencing did.
His eyes flicked downward, then up again, and he looked at the blind girl. "I would like the practice," he confirmed finally, "Yes."
There was something weird about his reactions, but with everything muffled through the wood floor it was hard for Toph to pick out exactly what bothered her. But he had agreed after all, and that was all it took for her to abandon the bag entirely, her grin widening into something filled with teeth. "Awesome," she said as she stopped in front of him, bouncing slightly on her toes again.
Benjamin had never encountered someone so happy to be entering a fight and and her intense enthusiasm made his doubt wane. He stepped back into a stance that was more firmly rooted than Toph's, his muscles poised to move. "Awesome," he mimicked in response, using her word because his own words and his own expressions (not that she could've seen them anyway) would have come up short. He watched her and began to move slowly, waiting until he had a sense of her rhythm before he shooting forward, opening the fight with a turning kick that started low but rose swiftly, aiming for her stomach.
Toph blocked it, trying to use his momentum to throw him off balance, and the fight was on. Not full force of anything like it, but she had to hold back a lot less than she thought, especially given how hard Benjamin could hit. Someday, she was going to get him onto the ground outside, and it was going to be amazing.
By the time she skidded to a stop, Toph was breathing hard, slightly bruised, and grinning hard enough to break her face. "That was awesome," she declared.
Benjamin wasn't breathing hard, a benefit of superhuman endurance, but the sheen of sweat on his brow and the alert expression he wore precluded the impression that the fight had been easy. The girl moved with admirable precision and a style that his own self-taught heavy-handedness prevented him from knowing, but which he was beginning to understand; she was a strong opponent. Her declaration seemed to mark the end of their skirmish and he stepped back, finally wiping the sweat away with the heel of his hand. "You would do well in the arena," he said, his words transformed into agreement only by his tone, "But I like fighting you here instead."
"Arena?" Toph echoed curiously, shifting absently as she came down from the adrenaline rush of the fight. "You mean like a tournament?"
"No." The answer was concise and without elaboration; mostly because it didn't occur to Benjamin to offer any. Instead, he asked, "What is your name?"
Right, this guy was weird. But also kind of awesome, so Toph just shrugged. "Toph," she said with a firm nod.
"Toph," Benjamin answered, repeating her name like an unfamiliar word and nodding in return, "I'm Benjamin. It's nice to meet you." The words still sounded like a script he was reading despite the fact that, in this case, it was true. He hadn't expected to find someone to practice with here and he'd never been able to approach the topic with Laura because she was too much like him. Fighting with her would never feel like 'sparring'. But then this girl had come into the gym and made the proposition. She'd even had the skills to back it up, though she'd held them in check. He was glad that he'd met her.
"You too," Toph said cheerfully enough, slowly getting used to his strange inflections. Maybe that would make more sense when she got him outside, but for the time being, it was fine. "We should do that again some time."
"Yes." A note of genuine (if subdued) enthusiasm came through on that monosyllabic response. Hearing it himself, Benjamin tensed and thought about it and decided it was probably all right. He looked forward to fencing with Kurt too and his roommate had assured him that had been acceptable. "I'm here," he provided after a considerable pause, "Often."
"Me too," Toph grinned, picking the tone of his voice out easily enough. Hell yeah, she was going to do this as often as she could. It wasn't like being back with the class, but it some ways it was almost better. Benjamin wasn't going to give her any quarter, even if she'd wanted it. "So that works. Anything else you wanna try?"
"Try?" Benjamin echoed with complete non-comprehension, his head angling slightly to one side. He attempted to put it together but came up blank, not knowing what sort of activity was supposed to follow combat practice between near strangers. But there was one way to find out and he didn't want to disappoint Toph besides. "Yes," he agreed.
"Okay..." she said slowly. It occasionally seemed like they were having two completely different conversations, but Toph sometimes felt like that with a lot of people. "Like what? Some other style or something?"
Hearing what Toph meant aloud and elaborated on, it made sense. But there was one problem. Benjamin lowered his head for a moment, thinking about what that meant, then answered, "I don't know 'styles'. I was not taught." That word, however, seemed to spark a thought and he added almost without pause, "Kurt has been teaching me to fence. Do you fence?"
"What, like with swords and stuff? Never done it. I like hand to hand better." But Toph's eyebrows drew together a little as she thought. Even she could agree that putting something sharp in her hands probably wasn't the best idea ever, but with Benjamin's reflexes it might not matter. "I could try, though," she said, only a little dubiously.
A faint smile twitched at the edges of Benjamin's lips without any effort at all. Something about the idea of passing on what his friend had taught him genuinely appealed to him and he turned abruptly to fetch the equipment from where he'd placed it along the wall. "When you become accustomed to a weapon," he reassured her, talking matter-of-factly as he moved, "It is an extension of the body. You'll pick it up quickly."
"If you say so," Toph snorted, absently turning her head to follow his movements. "But if you end up getting stabbed, don't say I didn't warn you."