I said I was just going to set these drabbles free, but guess who finally came back to roost for an extra scene before we get to the little oneshot that got these started? Hey, if Suyin's presence allows me to get extra self-indulgent and say that at least two of the scenarios in "The Daughters of Bei Fong"could work with canon as far as I know it, why not let the muses run loose like sugar-high toddlers? They got in line long enough to crank out a decent Nano day of a chapter in about that amount of time.
"You can't truly expect me to be introduced to a firebending master potentially good enough to teach me something while looking like this, can you?" At least two out of the three ostensible "well wishers" observing the latest argument from the balcony had no idea what Azula was complaining about, though long familiarity with the Firelord's sister suggested to the last that it had something to do with her hair.
"Azula," her "honor guard," and probably the driving force behind this trip, had a voice of honey and chamomile, but Ty Lee certainly didn't lack the muscle to pull the princess's hand away from the minute flaw in her bangs, "these little quirks just make you you. It's okay. They're not going to think any less of you for being human instead of a perfect painting of a firebender." She continued to talk Azula back from the edge in a low voice, but Mai couldn't hear the rest over the loud, impatient huff from the woman standing next to her.
"They're still at it? Tell Princess Crazypants she looks flawless to me," Toph smarted off, though Mai quickly elbowed her for silence with her free arm.
"Don't call her that."
Toph shrugged openly. "Why not? We're all thinking it." At least she'd kept her voice down this time.
"Ty Lee doesn't need any more trouble." What Mai said was true. Keeping Azula cooperative could only help them all in the long run, foremostly Azula herself.
Toph shrugged again, this one an unspoken concession to the Fire Lady's point. "What I don't understand is why Butterwasp keeps coming back for her." As airy and bubbly as Ty Lee was, Toph had more reason than most to fear her chi-blocking sting, and the blind woman's nickname for the Kyoshi Warrior reflected that.
"She's her best friend," Mai replied, absently bouncing Izumi on her hip when her daughter began to fidget.
"So were you, once," Toph countered, making grabby hands for the toddler without turning her head from the scene below. She was good with kids, but Mai didn't indulge "Tanty Toth" or the wriggling Izumi yet.
"I have found, over the years, that there are very few things worth getting excited about," Mai spoke loftily from the long and hoary experience of being three years older than Toph.
The earthbender just snorted. "I'd ask what you do bother to get excited about, if you weren't refusing to fork her over. Come on, Knives, I didn't even think you liked kids that much when I first met you."
Katara and her "midgets" had not visited recently, and Toph insisted that a quarter of the reason she hung out with them was to get in her quality time with the anklebiters.
"The only baby I was regularly around at that time was Tom-Tom, and my brother is the same brilliant young nobleman who decided that a jangly rubber toy designed for pet fire ferrets would be the perfect present for the Firelord's heir apparent." What was worse is that Mai suspected that her little brother had bought it for Druk, only to find that the dragon was now large enough to fit Tom-Tom's entire arm in his mouth, much less the toy.
"And you love Jingjang, don't you, munchkin?" Toph cooed to Izumi.
"Gingdang!" Izumi confirmed joyfully, rattling the rubber mouse-bird she'd been gnawing on while the women watched her blood aunt depart. It had been good for teething.
"I should've let the Avatar kidnap him," Mai groaned, mostly for show.
"Pfft, you know we were trying to drop him off with your parents before we even knew what the kid was like. We just didn't know if they'd take him back." Toph airly waved away the subject, then cocked her head as Ty Lee stepped away from adjusting some small stray strand around Azula's face and smiled, taking the elder princess's hand and leading her to the komodo-rhinos. Zuko and Druk were already ready to leave, but the dragon still wasn't big enough yet to take passengers.
"Hey, Mai?" Toph asked in a much less cocky tone.
Mai waited for her to continue, but the blind earthbender seemed willing to let the moment stretch to an uncomfortable length. "Yes?"
"What made you take him back?" She wasn't asking about Tom-Tom.
"What, the whole last-minute charge clinging to the side of a buffalo-squirrel in order to rescue me from a marriage made more for money than love wasn't romantic enough for you?" Mai had been furious at the time. Looking back on it, she could understand why Toph, Sokka, and Katara had laughed themselves sick at the story. It helped that Katara had been upset with Aang and Zuko for trampling quite literally over her day. It hadn't that Sokka had offered them his moose-lion for the next time Appa was too big to fit through the door and they needed a dramatic entrance. Foo-Foo Cuddlypoops still liked to rest his sabertoothed head on anyone unwise enough to stand still beneath him, and the moose-lion drooled.
"That wasn't why you accepted. You're smarter than some empty-headed mushball, Knives, and your dad might've burned a lot of the family money, but you didn't do it for status or fruit tarts, either." Mai rolled her eyes, smiling despite herself. Toph wouldn't see, either way. "I know he'd hurt you, though. Not physically and not on purpose, but still, how do you let that go?"
Mai straightened, bringing Izumi into both arms as she took a step towards the rail, watching her childhood friends turned family clamber onto their mounts. Druk flapped up into a clumsy circle around Zuko's head, scaring the komodo-rhino, and the Firelord bit back a curse, fighting for his seat. But as soon as he'd swallowed the second half of a word that he didn't want drifting up to the ears of his garrulous two-year-old daughter, Zuko patted the leathery shoulder beneath him and whistled to his adolescent dragon, waving for Druk to fly ahead as their vanguard. The komodo-rhinos that he, Ty Lee, and Azula rode were used to Druk, but they were calmer once the predatory shadow wasn't directly overhead. Once he confirmed that his sister and Ty Lee were settled in, Zuko turned to wave at the figures on the balcony. Mai waved back, taking Izumi's hand in hers to say one last goodbye to her father.
"Like that, I suppose," she told Toph, who offered her own belated loud and slightly off-color farewell. The earthbender had already been threatened for swearing in front of the babies, so she didn't repeat that mistake for fear of word getting back to Katara, but it was a good thing that Izumi wasn't aping gestures as well as words. "But the reason I accepted Zuko back, or at least part of it, just left to heal with the Sun Tribe."
"Azula?" Toph asked incredulously, absently pulling odd shapes of stone and metal from the balcony railing to amuse Izumi - and perhaps distract herself from the conversation, even though she had started it.
"At the time, she was disguising herself as the Kemurikage," Mai replied. "A spirit from my childhood nightmares."
She picked up the rubber toy from where her daughter had dropped it. Izumi was entranced with the stone moving under her hands and feet now, but there would be a hue and cry at naptime if Jingjang were not set in pride of place on the princess's pillow, especially since Papa wasn't home to sing her a lullaby. Mai had a voice far better suited to reading stories than carrying a tune, and she was uncertain if she would be game for five rounds of the same picture book with the curious monkey-kitten this afternoon. She would miss the singing, too, even if Zuko tended to be nearly as off-key as she was completely flat. (Good thing Izumi wouldn't ever have to sing for her supper; she was genetically predestined to be incapable of carrying a tune in a bucket.)
"Azula was using my fear to control what I loved. She was molding Zuko into something more like what she had become, manipulating him with a shadow of vengeance that she'd learned about from me. But my love is stronger than my fear." Oh, he'd had to prove it, on more than the one infamous buffalo-squirrel occasion, but while Mai might sometimes curse her husband's overdramatic gestures and tendency to take every setback for the country as a slight against his personal honor, she also loved that his first instinct was to step up and fix everything himself. It would be the death of them both, but Zuko wasn't going to let fear control him, either. "I figure if those are what drive Zuko, then I might as well skip the middleman."
"It does get you better access to fruit tarts that way." Toph poked her in the side while her hands were too full of Izumi and Jingjang to retaliate. "You've been stepping heavier lately, Knives." Well, Mai hadn't planned on saying anything until after Azula was safely ensconced with the Sun Tribe and on the mend, but trust the blind woman to see⦠"But how do you tell when you're able to fix something versus when you should just let it go?"
"What's-his-name didn't come with you," Mai observed in turn, happy to grab this thread instead of letting Toph pursue the clue too far. Especially if she was reading the reasons for the earthbender's line of stubborn but strangely reluctant questions correctly. "Johto?"
"Kanto," Toph corrected, smoothing the railing back to its original position with a stomp of her foot so that she could flop over morosely. "We're on a break."
"You seem to be on break every time you travel out of the Earth Kingdom." And as instrumental as Toph was in setting up the Republic City police department, she traveled a lot.
"Yeah."
Even Izumi burbled inquisitively at that dismissive statement of bald fact, and Mai relented and handed her off to snuggle and pat Toph's face with uncoordinated affection.
"So, Knives, I ask you for your specialty - no mercy, no truth-bending: do I give up?"
"I never give up," Mai said. "I lie in wait, and then I let fly." Azula kept stooping for the wrong targets, but even the most embattled messenger hawk could be trained, eventually. She kept coming back, after all.
Toph held Izumi close, kissing the little girl on her hairline like an upset child misplacing needed solicitude with her doll. Fortunately, as far as Mai was concerned, no sympathy given to her daughter was ever completely wasted. Izumi mirrored back what she was given with the same honest intensity of her father. "Well, if he doesn't let me fly then he's gonna learn that there isn't a cage that can hold me," Toph muttered. "But that doesn't mean I'm giving up on one o' these, either. You sure I can't steal her if you've got another on the way?"
"Zuko would be upset to come home and find his daughter missing," Mai refused her dryly. "But now that Katara has two and we're having a second, it seems like you and Suki have some catching up to do."
