In Republic City, people who are one thing are as common as people who are a little bit of everything, but that doesn't mean people accept it. It doesn't mean that they'll let such things go unremarked upon. This is how she comes to know herself as more than the daughter of the Avatar – or more accurately, as less.
She is five and like all five year olds is interested in the world around her. She slips away from the White Lotus Sentry that her mother sends with her when groceries are shopped for. It's not intentional, this time; she is memorized by the complex patterns of the shoes in front of her. They're made by Fire Nation mountain people, the Altai, they're called, and they have points and rows of ridges pressed into the horse-bison leather, the colorful patterns carefully planned chaos, orange-red with gold and cyan trim on a black base, silver with black flames tipped in pink, not beaded like moccasins from her grandmother but painted on. It's just one vendor in the sea of hundreds, but it stops her in her tracks, and she traces over the patterns with the tip of her index finger. Altai people are mysterious, with their strange dialects and odd clothes, and she decides she likes them.
"You like?" asks the Fire Nation man, the Altai vendor with his hair in a long low braid and his light mountain-people skin. He has serious brown eyes, but a nice smile that grows when she nods enthusiastically. "You would like a pair. Good for earthbending," he assures her, glancing at her green eyes.
"I don't know what I can bend yet," she huffs, face falling. The man is in his forties, so it surprises her when he kneels down beside her, away from the crowds for a moment.
"Just be a good person. Bending changes. That does not." He smiles when she nods uncertainly. He stands, looking satisfied. "My parents were both good, strong firebenders. But I, I am gifted at this instead. I call it shoebending."
That gets a laugh out of her, and for a few more moments everything is right with the world.
She resumes looking over pairs, each one intricately made, fur lined, stiff and meant to brave hard weather. A thought occurs to her, that the Fire Nation's mountain people and her grandmother's people must go through the same ice and rocks in the winter. They have different way of decorating, but they're so similar that she ends up spending all her allotted money on a pair of boots. Were that this was a better world, that would be what she took away from it, that there was great beauty in the other nations and people were good people. She tucks her old shoes into her bag and wears the boots even though they're a little too big and it's summer and her feet sweat in them. They're red with gold and black bands at the top, little carefully done yellow embers falling down the sides.
Now she just has to find the White Lotus Sentry. She's not in a panic yet, because she knows he's always here, in the market place, if he loses her. All she has to do is walk and she'll find him. She tucks her trousers into the boots, not noticing at first the snickers of her in her mismatched outfit of Water Tribe tunic, plain pants and Fire Nation boots, but then an older girl, nine or eight, points to her and laughs. She has on pretty Fire Nation clothes, layered against the heat, and so do her friends. They must go to a private school. The Avatar's little daughter pauses to stare at them, then goes over to them, not mad, just confused. She's still innocent, but she's not going to be for long in Republic City.
"What're you laughing at?" she asks, sending them into a tizzy. They all have black hair like her father, put into trendy haircuts, and their eyes are browns and golds. They are four perfect purebred people, and to them she isn't the Avatar's daughter, she's a mutt.
"You," the tallest one, the girl with porcelain pale skin, says with an air of superiority. "You look so stupid, acting like you're one of us."
"My dad's Fire Nation," she replies as a defense, but her stomach is churning unpleasantly as their laughter increases, the way they're looking down at her making her feel foolish. She's hot in the face, and not just from the summer sun up above. "No, really, he is."
"You look like mud," another girl says loudly, getting a passing grown up to chuckle. "If you're really half and half you shouldn't look like mud with leaves in it."
Her hand comes up to her eyes, questioning. "My eyes? You mean there's something wrong with my eyes? But my Uncle has eyes like this."
"There's something wrong with all of you, then," the pale girl sighs, and it's like a knife through the chest. "Not just your eyes. You're a muddy mess. No wonder you're out here by yourself. I certainly wouldn't want you around."
"An Thi, that's going too far," a girl in the back tries to say, but she's ignored.
"Get out of here, mud. We're all clean here," An Thi dismisses her with a shove, and she stumbles in a daze away from the girls.
Eventually the White Lotus Sentry finds her down in the lower end of market stalls, staring into her own reflection. There's the mud-colored skin she'd been mocked for, the dull forest green eyes she'd heard called her leafs. Her hair was dark as her father's, black as a raven-hawk's wing. Her face was heart shaped, with ears others might see as large but were normal for the Water Tribe. These details all made her ugly, made her insides twist, and though she refused to elaborate on what she bought, the bag tied tightly shut, she glanced down at her soft moccasins every other step on the way home. When other people laughed, her gaze dropped to the ground or to the nearest reflective surface, to a reflection she had only begun to dislike.
By the time she was full grown, she would learn to truly hate it.
