Unexpected Aftermath

[Since When Was I The Hero?-!]

An Avatar: the Last Airbender plotbunny

By

EvilFuzzy9

Gossip was a strange thing. Jeong-Jeong, were he writing this narrative, might compare it to fire. It had a life of its own, it grew and changed and consumed as only a living thing could. It spread quickly, dangerously, impossible to control and all too often destroying everything it touched. It was dangerous, best avoided, best snuffed out before it grew too large to extinguish.

It would be a rather apt analogy, all things told.

Rumors, similarly, were also a lot like weeds. If you did not nip them in the bud as soon as they appeared, before you knew it they would be everywhere. They spread with uncanny ease, taking up all available space and choking out more desirable plants. If you failed to stop them before they could spread, then either you learned to live with them or you got down on your hands and knees and started the long, hard, dirty work of digging up the entirety of your lawn or garden.

And it really was strange how quickly these things could travel. Spy masters with networks more vast and tangled than a modern celebrity's friend list on a social networking site, dedicated couriers and specially bred messenger hawks trained to take the swiftest routes physically possible with only the barest amount of rest, and still simple gossip traveled faster than could possibly be tracked, or matched, by even the best intelligence networks in the Four Nations - almost before it was here, it was already there.

It seemed impossible how quickly simple barroom tales and idle rumors could travel, or how far and wide they could spread. Or how they could change in the spreading. Like living organisms mutating and evolving from one generation to the next, the tales that were told of Sokka son of Hakoda in that bar that night grew and changed with every retelling - and there were many retellings.

One slightly scrawny engineer became a dangerous firebender became several firebenders became an entire army that he fought off with nothing more than a boomerang and his wits. Two female compatriots became two scantily clad female compatriots became two well-endowed scantily clad female compatriots who were also his secret lovers and part of a vast harem of beautiful and dangerous ladies from every corner of the world. A desperate attempt to catch Ozai or stop the fleet became a daring effort to blunt the tip of the proverbial spear that was the Fire Nation's air force became a perfectly executed plan to hold off the entire rest of the army while the Avatar dealt with the Fire Lord alone.

The tale, you might say, grew in the telling. As it spread from one ear to the next, it became gradually more embellished, more fantastic. As it traveled up the coast and further inland, people who had met Sokka over the course of his travels with the Avatar added their own anecdotes and perspectives to the continually evolving legend.

"That guy with the boomerang? I remember him. He warned our village of a plot to blow up the dam upriver and helped us evacuate. Saved our skins, he did!"

"That kid was a damn fine fisherman, a real natural. Brought in a shark with his bare hands!" ("No he didn't, you crazy old coot!" "Get off my back, woman!")

"Sokka? Ohhh yeaahhh, I remember him. He's that kid with the arrow tattoo on his head, right?"

"I heard his first lover was the princess of the North Pole, but she sacrificed her life to become the Moon Spirit. They say he still longs for her embrace on nights of the full moon, too! Isn't that just the most romantic?"

"I remember that boy, helped save my hide. Fought off a swarm of canyon crawlers in nothing but a loincloth, I tell ya!"

"Haha, man he was a real chatty guy, wasn't he, Lilz? Yeeaaahh. A real funny little guy, that Sokka, with those big pointy ears and them fuzzy little paws. And he could fly! Maaaan, I'd never seen a monkey that could do that before! (...Well, okay, there was this one time...)"

"Thanks to the help him and his friends, myself and our village's other earthbenders were able to escape from that Fire Nation prison barge. His sister motivated us to rebel, and his ingenuity provided us with the earth we needed to fight the guards - the coal they were using for fuel!"

"He helped me perfect my hot air balloon design, before it was stolen by the Fire Nation!"

"SEEEECREET TUNNNEEEEEEEL! SEEEECREET TUNNNEEEEEEEL!"

"THE BOULDER suspects that there may be a THING between him and the BLIND BANDIT. But you did NOT hear THAT from THE BOULDER."

"You didn't hear it from me, but word has it that, this Sokka dude? His girlfriend is some sorta crazy hot amazon chick who can jump, like, ten stories into the air."

"I'm tellin' ya, man, that kid's the one pulling the Avatar's strings. It makes sense. Think about it."

"I hear he's part of some sort of ancient secret society spanning all across the Four Nations."

"I hear he's its leader."

And on it went. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, the legend of Sokka grew larger and larger as it traveled, gaining more momentum with every retelling. From Yu Dao barflies and rumormongers, the tale passed to traveling merchants and sailors, who carried it with them as they continued along their trade routes.

Over land and sea it spread, the tale thriving in bars and taverns and inns and docks, where it passed from the tongues of merchants to the ears of locals, who themselves shared the stories with their friends and their families, and other merchants traveling by other trade routes. This process repeated itself many times, the legend of Sokka Hakoda's son, friend and adviser to the Avatar, vanquisher of the Phoenix King's fleet, defender of the Earth Kingdom, and Hero of the Hundred Year War spreading throughout the land.

And who can say how or why his tale managed to grab the hearts and minds of the people so? Perhaps it was because this Sokka, like so many others, was a non-bender, and yet in spite of that still able to stand proudly - as an equal - alongside the likes of the Fire Lord, and the Avatar. Here was someone like them, someone who had been born with no special gift (save perhaps a certain knack for resourcefulness), no bending, and yet had still been able to make his way alongside the greats of his era.

To non-benders the world over, the tale of Sokka was, perhaps, something that gave them hope that they too could make a difference if they tried, that they too could become great. To the downtrodden masses, it represented a hope that one day the wounds of the war could be forgotten. After all, had not Sokka also lost loved ones to the Fire Nation? Had he not also fought them wherever he could? Yet now he was accounted a friend of the Fire Lord, a fellow liberator of the Fire Nation. If he could forgive and forget, than maybe so could they.

Put frankly, to them he became as much a symbol as a man. He was like a living legend, a modern day folk hero. He was larger-than-life, but he still felt approachable. And perhaps that, more than anything else, was what made his tale so beloved, so compelling. He was, ultimately, underneath all of the enshrouding myth and memetic mutation, simply just another Average Joe, like you or me. Not a banished prince, or a destined savior, or a prodigy bender; he was just a guy with a boomerang.

...and it was also still one HELL of a tale.

Lao Bei Fong had not been having a very good day.

Well, to be more accurate, he had not been having a very good week, either. In fact, if he was to be entirely honest with himself, the whole last month had really just been nothing but one headache after another.

It had all started with the news of the defeat of the Fire Lord (or was it the Phoenix King?) at the hands of the Avatar, and the report of the newly crowned Fire Lord Zuko's call for the immediate withdrawal of all nonessential Fire Nation military personnel from the Earth Kingdom.

Now, ostensibly, this was a good thing for the Earth Kingdom and its citizens - the war was over! the war was over! - people like Lao Bei Fong and his wife, Poppy. And it was, for the most part. At the very least, Lao was certainly grateful that he no longer had to fear his estate being stormed and his assets seized by Fire Nation troops. No, now he just had to worry about being audited by the Earth King and strung up by the gibbet for the crime of treason.

So, yes, I suppose you could say that old Lao was in something of a pickle.

You see, the Bei Fongs had for generations been one of the wealthiest families in the world. They were a very old, very prestigious family that had for centuries profited heavily from international trade. They had strong ties to wealthy merchant and noble families throughout the world, ties of business and marriage dating back to several centuries before the Hundred Year War. For nearly a thousand years, the Bei Fong family had enjoyed its reputation as one of the wealthiest, most influential families in the world. For twenty-four generations, the heads of the Bei Fong family had benefited from partnership and trade between the Four Nations - Lao's own great-great-great-grandfather had dined with both the Earth King and Fire Lord, and negotiated the safe passage of Bei Fong merchant ships between the Northern and Southern Water Tribes after a dispute between the two Chiefs.

The Winged Boar had endured through countless challenges and hardships, and always they had come out on the top of the heap. Through generations of ruthless political maneuvering and countless marriages of convenience (Lao's own wife had been the eldest daughter of a wealthy, young family of Yu Dao industrialists), the Bei Fong family had managed to thrive and prosper for centuries.

But then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.

The genocide of the Air Nomads - the Rape of the Four Temples, as Lao had heard it called in a rambling poem by some unknown author - shocked the world, and the Fire Nation's subsequent assaults on the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes made it basically everyone's enemy. And for many years, the Bei Fong family - which had prior to the war profited extensively from a number interests in the Fire Nation's booming economy - fell into relative obscurity.

For, you see, Mao Bei Fong, Lao's grandfather and the head of the family during the reign of Sozin, had been a very patriotic soul. The moment he learned of the war, he severed all of their family's extensive ties with the Fire Nation (no small feat, since more than a few daughters of wealthy Fire Nation families had married into the Bei Fongs over the generations), and invested the vast majority of the family's liquid assets into local Earth Kingdom businesses. Unfortunately, as patriotic as Mao was, he did not have the most economic sense, and several of his most important investments failed catastrophically, leaving the Bei Fong family in rather dire straits, financially.

Fortunately, Lao's father, Long Bei Fong, had been a more practical sort. When Long took over the family business, the first thing he did was salvage their connections in the Fire Nation, secretly investing most of the Bei Fong family's remaining capital in various promising Fire Nation industries. Long's gamble paid off considerably better than his father's had, and by the time he retired to let his son take over the reins, the Bei Fong family had regained most of its former wealth.

Lao, in turn, had followed shrewdly in his father's tracks, secretly continuing business with Fire Nation merchants and industrialists, with the continued prosperity of the Winged Boar to show for it. Everything had been going swimmingly, really. Aside from his daughter's blindness (an unfortunate condition that tended to pop up every few generations in the Bei Fong line) and his continued failure to produce a suitable heir - and goodness knows how hard he had tried - things had been going well enough for the Bei Fong family.

At least, right until the day the Avatar chose to grace their home with his presence, demand his daughter as an earthbending teacher, and - when Lao quite reasonably said no - abduct said daughter and spirit her away to who knows where. And now the war was over, the dust was clearing, his daughter was suddenly a great war hero and NOT a helpless kidnapping victim, and the Earth King's tax collectors were beginning to ask Lao about his supposed "off-shore accounts" and more suspicious investments.

Lao glanced around somewhat nervously at the decor of the restored Bei Fong manor. Never before had he noticed quite how... Fire Nation... it looked. All dragons and volcanoes and wooden furnishings, with not so much as a single badger mole in sight.

Even if this was the way the Bei Fong manor had been decorated for generations, Lao still knew that auditors might find it suspicious when added up with other small incongruencies, and suspicious auditors digging through his financial records was the last thing he wanted.

Lao sighed. He knew that there was one way he might be able to salvage things without spending thousands of gold pieces on bribing high ranking officials, and his wife Poppy knew it, too. The time was come for their daughter to do her duty to the family. The two of them had decided as much the previous night.

An arranged marriage would be for the best.

But the question was, who? Lao knew that the most effective way to quash any rumors of treasonous past dealings would be to engage his daughter, Toph Bei Fong, to someone in high standing with the Earth King, at the very least. It would also be very helpful if this person were a war hero or commander of some sort, a man who had fought against the Fire Nation and been recognized for his service.

Ideally, the chosen suitor should be young, promising, someone who represented the future of the Earth Kingdom, and of the world as a whole. Somebody handsome, charming, charismatic - a darling of the masses and a friend to the nobility. Someone with plenty of business sense, and either a strong enough will to rein in their wild child of a daughter, or else enough patience to endure her antics.

Lao shook his head.

"Ah, but where could I ever hope to find such a person?" he opined, shaking his head once more before looking down to go through the mail.

And that's when he saw it. That blasted messenger hawk.

He scowled, thinking bitterly of the letter his daughter had wrote her. And by association, his mind went also to young Toph's traveling companions, and Lao recalled some interesting rumors he had recently overheard some of his servants sharing during one of their breaks, wild accounts of a certain Water Tribe boy's exploits in the war - a young man who just so happened to be one of his daughter's traveling companions, and one of whom his daughter was most certainly fond, if Lao still knew anything about a young maiden's heart.

And the head of the Bei Fong family smiled craftily, the seeds of a plan already beginning to take root in his mind.

A/N: Is this what it looks like?

MAYBE, I dunno. What I DO know, though, is the main characters should FINALLY appear in the next chapter.

...Which isn't as bad as it sounds, actually, considering how quickly I tend to update newer fics... Hell, I updated this the day after posting it. (probably with a bunch of obvious errors that my eyes for some reason consistently refuse to notice when I am proofreading.)

Also, if there are any of you who have already figured out where I'm going with this, do you mind filling me in? D:

Also, also, I kinda sorta vaguely got the basis of the idea of the Bei Fong's being sorta... vaguely treason-ish from ATLA Annotated. That's a real fun site. XD

P.S., Daisy312, in response to your review: Thanks! Glad you think so. Though, since this fic is intended as a divergence from ATLA canon, there's is no reason I can't have Sokka be Lin's daddy. ;)

Edit: 7-14-13 - Corrected some more errors, esp. in the second half of the chapter. Expanded on a couple of things with a few words here and there.