She knows what a father is. Or what ones are supposed to be like, rather.
At least, she thinks she does.
Images of a younger her, accompanied by a man she thought she knew flood through her as she gazes up at her polished ceiling with the slanted walls, and flowery designs.
Her mother carved those designs herself when she had wanted a big girl room, please, please, please, Mommy, I'm six now! Make flowers grow in my room like you do outside!
Her mother loved flowers and gardening, she remembers. Almost as much as Earthbenders.
"These people, these benders...They took away your mother, the love of my life. They've ruined the world. But with Amon, we can fix it and build a perfect world, together. We can help people like us everywhere!"
She feels like a flower now. Given nurture and love and care to grow up and up and up...but someone comes around and clips her away to the roots.
She has too many thorns.
She was never meant to be a rose anyway.
Her bed is much too small in a much too empty and lonely mansion, now occupied by one. She finnaly takes in the freedom she's awaited all her life to enjoy-without the butler and the maids one step behind her, without the press smothering her- and finds that the price of freedom is far too costly.
She wonders if her father ever loved her at all, or if it was all a lie.
For not the first time, she wishes she were a bender; a firebender like her great-grandfather on her mother's side, she found out from reading one of the many historical Sato Family books that litter the library- and tries to imagine her father sympathizing with her and benders, and loving her and going against Amon like her heart yearns him to.
"I love you, dad."
She wants to believe she still does, but she's not really sure. Maybe she's just desperate. Maybe she just wants to be loved.
She wants to believe that loving someone who you have all the right in the world to hate makes you stronger and the better person, but maybe that just makes her weak and a desperate little girl.
She wishes someone would tell her what to feel so she can just stop, and pick a feeling and stick with it.
She wants to stop. Stop with everything.
She wants to pretend that she didn't purposely plunge herself into the bottom of the pool last night, holding onto the railing underwater to prevent herself from getting air, and waiting, waiting, for her dad to come in and rescue her. Images of her friends, Mako, Korra, Bolin, forcing her up and out again after too long, painful gasps of air, water in her throat, tears in her eyes, and she had called each of their names, but no one came.
She hates this quiet; it reminds her of the silent, empty days after the break in, after mom's funeral, when the office was all burnt and ransacked and smelt like death. When dad stayed away from the office that still whispered of evil laughter and her mother's screams and burnt flesh, and he only spoke to her though painful eyes and masked glances and quivering lips, locking himself away in his bedroom for hours. They were both silent for far too long.
In the end, she stares up at her ceiling and concludes that she will love her father, because it is what her mother would have wanted her to do.
Her hand blindly searches for her mother's lilac-scented perfume bottle on her nightstand, drags her fingers along other trivial items like her hair brush and her lipstick and her face-cream, and sends them crashing to the ground, staining her rug like blood. When her fingers lock desperately around the familiar out-line of the smooth- edged, oval bottle that never lacks warmth, she draws the bottle close her chest and squeezes.
Once.
Twice.
Lilacs swim around the room.
She inhales, the smell filling her nostrils, blooming inside her. Maybe she can be a flower now.
It's almost like mommy's there with her.
Yes, for mommy, she can try to be a flower again, and grow with her friends that will water her.
She closes her eyes, and inhales.