Title: la fase celeste
Summary: Jun does not conquer the world.
Character(s): Jun(e)
Notes: Regarding her name: it's listed here as Jun, while the wikia for the series says June. I went without the e. "La fase celeste" means "heavenly phase." Quote comes from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence.
Brief look at Jun's past, childhood to after the end of the war. Feedback is appreciated! [PS subtle character cameos have fun :)]
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
i.
Jun is born to dust.
Her mother dies before the year is up, closer to her birth than that, within the first two months of Jun's life. From what her father says later, it is her fault, that she destroyed the woman, left her bared to too many diseases and that sepsis set in all too quickly.
She's carried tight to the back of the healer that couldn't save the young mother, only them and her father along with a residing sage present to guide the woman to the Spirit World, even if it's with the woman's husband's prayers and not her people's. It's hot out, hotter than the earth has been in many generations, since the first attack of Sozin, and silent, with winds blowing fine grains into their eyes.
When she asks how it all transpired her father looks at her evenly. Tells her, she did not cry, no tears were shed save those caused by the spray of earth into their eyes. He gazes at her for a long time afterward, this four year old with beauty awaiting the frame of her face, and then he takes her to learn the arts the next day.
ii.
The first time she goes on a bounty run with her father she is seven. By then she has mastered the basic forms, adept at taking on the elder bounty hunter when he challenges her to a sparring match. She can't beat him, won't be able to for a long time, but she proves a formidable opponent for her age and her father remains convinced raising his daughter himself was a good choice.
It's a relatively simple search, and as payment the lord that hired her father generously bestows a second payment to Jun, saying, "I think it's time for a companion."
He leads them to a shady businessman, with a shaved head and an empty hole where his left eye should be. The man doesn't bother covering it, and Jun stares openly at the angry pink wound when they meet at the hottest part of the day. His voice is reedy as he asks, "And what does the ickle girl want?" as if expecting her to plead for a jackalope. Jun's father is silent next to her, as is the man who had hired him, instead allowing the young girl to wander through the dank shop as the adults wait in front.
Jun spots an armadillo lion cub, almost sticks her hand in its cage before its tiny gnashing jaws manage to just snag her fingernail. She gasps, scowls at the tiny creature, before baring her teeth and stalking deeper into the decrepit back rooms. There are containers of canyon crawlers and bumble flies, and the faint whimpers of eel hound pups somewhere in the building. That's when Jun spots it.
It's a tiny little shirshu, maybe a few weeks old. He's tiny, probably far littler than his siblings had been, and he snuffles pitifully in his cage. He looks cold and sick, but Jun takes a look at his paws—giant, strong appendages, claws already sharpened to a point—and marches for him, snatching him up by the scruff. He tries to roll into a ball but can't, weak, and she tucks him inside the scratchy gray shirt she wears.
When she marches out of the shop it's to the bemusement of the parties waiting, and the market man says, "Now, why don't you pick a stronger thing, princess? That one won't last you the night," while her father scolds, "You get one chance, Jun," but she glares at both. The man paying for the creature smiles knowingly.
"I want Nyla," she says, hitching the bundled creature closer to her heart, and then she and her father part ways with the men.
iii.
The kid would be handsome if not for that terrible Phoenix tail. The scar is off-putting, sure, but Jun has seen far worse and she'd be lying if she said she didn't have her own fair share of marks. He's a demanding little snit, though, and his uncle too much of a creep—though she doesn't doubt that the lines he spews would have worked on a lesser woman, when his hair was still dark and thick.
That waterbender though. Of course it would be a Water tribe girl to get the best of her. It's later, when they meet again, that she concedes that the girl won fair and square, but even that isn't enough. The news she brings is too bad.
"He doesn't exist," she tells the ragtag group of teenagers before her, and wonders when the Fire Nation had become an ally to the rest of the Avatar. She's seen the telltale signs of too intense fights, has gone on hunts only to return with a scorched skull as proof of an attack. The tracking she does now isn't just for criminals—it's for rich mothers who can't find their sons, for men whose daughters and nieces have been taken, for the husband who got into a scrum with some soldiers and never made it home. Jun takes the money, but sometimes she sees those young widows and pays a child or two to bring her grain. It's war; she figures she can afford to smooth the scars it leaves.
They're going to save the world, they tell her, and she almost laughs in their faces. She grew up in the war-torn countryside, could feel the warring sides within her bones, and even for all their traveling and foes they haven't seen the half of it. If Jun were a better woman, she'd tell them that what they have to worry about is what will happen after the war, but as it is, she takes them to the creepy uncle, and calls it a day well spent.
iv.
"The world is saved," her father says when she visits, and his voice is thick and gravelly from too many years of bad habits and a life on the road. He's not as thin as he was when Jun was growing up, but the wiriness of his muscles still stand out in his neck. She shifts in her seat next to his bed, listening wearily to the wetness of his coughs. He won't be going anywhere soon, he's too tough, but it all makes her uncomfortable. Her father is not a weak man. That's not the kind of person who could have raised one of (if not the) greatest bounty hunter in the Earth Kingdom.
"For now," she answers him, and he gives her a wry smile. One gnarled hand reaches out to her, twisted from too little cushion at his joints, and tugs on her hair. For the first time in what feels like years she has it out of a topknot, having pinned carefully at the base of her skull like a good Earth Kingdom girl. Physical affection was not a part of her childhood, and what she feels for her father is little more than passive aggressive tolerance. She gives a smile that's more of a grimace, and her father tells her, "You could have told them," and she freezes.
"Whom," Jun says coldly, after a moment of tense silence, using the obnoxious accent of the nuns caring for her ailing father, "do you speak of?" The man next to her laughs, nearly choking on his mirth. His scraggly white hair stands out against the darkness of his skin.
"The Avatar," he says, "child, you didn't expect me to just hide away and die, did you? I have connections everywhere. I made you."
Jun stands, then, glaring at her father. She mutters, "You crazy old man. Are you ever going to die? Or am I going to be stuck paying for your needs forever?"
"Such a pity," he says, "to look so much like your mother and be so much like me."
v.
Fire Lord Zuko calls upon her for a favor, and she only accepts because she knows what it's like to not have a mother, and she wonders what it's like to love one. She fails, yes, but he doesn't begrudge her—a feeling that's new to Jun, because for all the successful jobs she's completed, her father will continue to lie in a bed at the monastery and explain just how she's disappointed him, and he's the type of man to find a way to do it forever. She's long gotten over any sense of hurt that may arise out of his words, but it's still irritating to sit next to him for tea and listen to the grating of his voice.
After the Ursa-debacle Jun settles back to the countryside she was born in, a few hours away from where her father is residing. Nyla's getting older, but Jun is only twenty-five. She's a year older than her mother had been when she had died, and the most capable bounty hunter in the Earth Kingdom, if not the world. It's not common knowledge but people know who she is and what she's capable of.
It's a little lonely, if she's honest, but she makes do with the savings she still has and the occasional calls she still gets. The clientele are much like those of the end of the war, families and friends searching for loved ones they'll never see alive again, and occasionally a letter from Ba Sing Se having her track down a former Dai Li member and various traitors. Her little house is styled as a pagoda, two floors of stable stones. Upstairs are her personal quarters, the entire place sparsely decorated. She wonders, vaguely, about making a separate area for Nyla.
In the end, she decides against it, but only after a visit by someone claiming to be a lost member of the Freedom Fighters.
By then she's in her early thirties, years of solitude creating a peace that she didn't expect she could find, or even one she felt she deserved. Her hair is beginning to silver, but only just barely; a few strands here and there that she stares at in bemusement when she catches her reflection in a glass of fire-whiskey.
"They were a terrorist group," she says idly as they take tea together, and the man smiles. He has shaggy hair, and his collarbone is visible above his ragtag clothes. He's looks as if he's barely out of boyhood, but he has an aged charisma in his voice that Jun hasn't had the pleasure of hearing in a long time.
"They were dedicated to ousting injustice," he stresses, and Jun hides her smirk behind her cup, silently laughing at his naïveté.
"There's trouble out West," she says instead, eyes half-lidded as she watches him.
"The Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom will never be allies," he tells her, and she frowns, thinking of her mother.
"Don't be so sure of that," she says, "crossbreeding has been common for at least a generation or two."
"Are we rhinoceros beetles?" he asks, voice lilting with something close to laughter, and Jun peers at him closely. She can see the outline of a scar at his sternum, the fabric of his tunic worn thin. He notices it and leers.
"What exactly are you looking for?" she finally says, tilting her head, and even through the curtain of her hair she can see his eyes scale over her. He smiles with too many teeth, tanned skin looking sickly.
"A lot of things," he says, smooth, "but first, a few old friends."
She finds the friends he seeks, and then a few more after that, and when she starts feeling more like an errand girl than a bounty hunter she puts a stop to it. "Next time I see you," she says, "you better make it worth my while," and doesn't feel guilty, not even with the knowledge of his youth, eight or ten years younger than she. He knows what he's doing, and so does Jun.
vi.
Jun visits the same healer that delivered her, and survives. The daughter she greets comes out with a shock of dark hair like herself, but even as a newborn Jun can tell that the girl's father is there, his features ready to bloom. When the infant opens her eyes, she knows that the color might fade to match the charcoal of her own, or it may stay that dark impressionable shade that had made that captivating face so much more intriguing. She even has his chin.
Regardless, he left, knowing that the child she carried was his—but he didn't do it with malice. Jun has seen many men come and go; some of them hers, some of them strangers. But she knows nastiness when she sees it, and for all the darkness that lingered in the child's father, it was not evil that hid there. He came to her for a reason, and it just so happened that it caught up with him.
She will never see him again, but Jun knows she will survive as she always has. She has more money than she knows what to do with, and the former Fire Nation Colonies are in need of some clean up. Once she heals, Jun will pack up and take her daughter to the region on Nyla, and perhaps once the towns are settled, she can amount to something. Or perhaps do as Jun did, and help make someone to make a difference, produce an heir who will save a city.
For now, she rests and admires her daughter's chin.
.
.
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