Just when Zuko thought he couldn't be prouder of his daughters, they kept proving him wrong.
A part of the Cop/Doctor AU seen in Vigilantes, and also seen in A Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That and Bending Conventions.
Content warning: Dark themes, aftermath/description of abuse, discussion of corporal punishment, teenagers being dense and impatient.
December 4th – Necklace
A PART OF ZUKO FELT THAT HE SHOULD MARK THIS DAY DOWN IN HISTORY. After all, for the first time in as long as he could remember, his daughters agreed on something. This was a rather big deal, seeing as Korra was seventeen and Ursa was fourteen and thus were close enough in age to grow up together and be friends of a sort but also close enough in age to fight over literally everything. Being only twenty-three-months apart from his own sister, Zuko understood how precious such moments of consensus were.
Unfortunately, the thing they were agreeing on was that he was being an idiot. Since this was an opinion he generally endorsed, he couldn't blame them, but that was no excuse for being such teenagers about it.
Besides, today, for once, he wasn't being an idiot. He was just being a good husband.
He put down the roll of blue ribbon he had been examining, picked up the next, holding it up the light, touching it, feeling it, running his fingertips along its soft, smooth surface. "You two are cruising for a bruising, you know that, right?"
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched his daughters roll their eyes and huff in unison as he fondly remembered a time when that phrase had actually had an effect on his girls. "We're a bit too old for you to bend us over your knee, Dad," his eldest, Korra, said, pulling the tight braid her hair was in over her shoulder and starting to unravel it.
"You're never too old for that," Zuko said, giving up on the latest roll of blue ribbon, setting it down, and picking up the next one. "You two are lucky I'm not my mother."
Ursa, his youngest, scoffed, stepping forward to bat her sister's hands away from her sister's braid and starting to unravel and redo it herself. "We know O-bāchan never laid a hand on you, Dad."
Zuko couldn't help but laugh. "Why, because she's so sweet and pinches your cheeks and buys you as much ice cream as you could ever want?"
Korra frowned. "Well…um…yeah…?"
Zuko just shook his head, clucking his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he set down the roll of ribbon and picked up the next. "My father beat the hell out of me, and your O-bāchan hated it, but that doesn't mean that she didn't spare the rod." Anything but, Zuko remembered. By Fire Nation standards, he had always been soft and indulgent towards his daughters, which was part of the reason why it was hard to explain how, though his mother had violently resisted the beatings his father had dealt out to him and his sister, that didn't mean his youngest daughter's namesake had been adverse to the occasional spanking, or the less-than-occasional wooden-spoon-to-the-head.
But his daughters had never seen that side of his mother. They only knew the woman with the greying hair who always wore long-sleeved, high-necked shirts and melted into a puddle under their hugs and kisses. They had not the slightest inkling of the woman who had served fifteen years in a Fire Nation prison for pumping nine bullets into his father's chest.
He deserved every single one, his sister had said, as she held his hand in the hospital room, and a thousand more besides.
There was a hand on his arm, and he looked at it, followed the arm until it ended in his youngest daughter's face, a face that was equal parts kind, sympathetic, and exasperated. "Look, Dad, we get it, Mom's necklace needs a new ribbon, but this is the seventh store we've been to and this is getting a bit ridiculous."
"And if Mom knew that you had dragged yourself over half the city, trying to find the precise right shade of blue?" Korra chimed in, stepping to her sister's side. "She'd be pulling off a shoe to hit you with."
Zuko sighed, setting the latest roll of ribbon back down and turning towards his daughters. "You're probably right," he admitted, "but that's beside the point." He took a deep breath, released it, ran his fingertips over the wall of blue ribbons and yarns. "Do you know why your Obāsan Zula still has dolls?"
His daughters looked at each other, having an entire conversation with nothing more than ten seconds of facial expressions and shrugs, before Korra said, "We asked once, but she said we should talk to you about it."
He chuckled, running a hand through his hair. "When she turned six, our father decided that she was too old for dolls, that they represented weakness, if you love something so much, then you're nothing, less than nothing, one step from destruction, so he made her bring them to him, one by one, in ascending order, so that her favorites were on the top, and when they were all in a pile in front of our house, he made her burn them."
His daughters gasped, their eyes going wide, the blood draining from their faces. "She…" Ursa had to take a few calming breaths before she could continue, as Zuko's clamped down on a feeling of pride. He and Katara weren't perfect parents, no one was, but they were good enough that the mindless cruelty some parents were capable of came as a shock, and he couldn't help but feel that that was a mark in the win column. "She did it?"
He didn't tell them the whole story, not then, didn't tell them that the only reason Azula had agreed was because Zuko and their mother were spitting blood from their mouths from the beatings they had received when they tried to stop Ozai. She's just a child, their mother had said, Stop hurting my mom, Zuko had cried, Leave them alone and I'll do it, his six-year-old sister had screamed, and Zuko still wasn't sure it had been the right call.
Instead, he settled for saying, "Let's just say that she felt she didn't have a choice. But every year after that, on her birthday, your O-bāchan and I snuck her new dolls. Three times our father found them, three times she had to burn them, but she kept taking them and hiding them and playing with them, even when she was definitely too old for dolls, and she went to great lengths to keep every single one that had survived, bringing them with her when her and I had to move to Republic City to come live with our uncle, and do you know why?"
His daughters looked at each other, communicating in their secret, almost silent language. "Because they were so important to her," Korra said, her voice soft and low, "because they represented so much."
Zuko nodded, turning back to the wall of ribbon and yarn. "And your mother's necklace means a thousand times more to her than your Obāsan's dolls mean to your Obāsan, and those dolls matter more than words could say to your Obāsan, so, sorry, but we're in this for the long haul, until I find the precise shade of blue."
It was a few minutes before it happened, a few minutes until his eldest daughter's hands appeared, took the most recent roll of ribbon from his hands, carelessly shoved it back with others. "There's no hope of finding it here, Dad," Korra said, and when he turned to face her, he saw that his daughters were holding each other's hands, and that Korra, for all that she was seventeen, was already taking his own. "The big box stores are obviously going to be a wash. We're going to have to start trying the little Mom-and-Pops."
Ursa held up her mobile in her free hand. "Ming," her best friend, "says that there's this little shop run by this old lady that her mom swears by. Apparently, she can even mix up special dyes to order. We should go there next."
The year before, Zuko had clapped his hands until he couldn't feel his palms and cheered until his throat was sore as he had watched Korra win the city's championship for high school-age firebenders. He had worried that he would never feel as proud of her as he had when the judges had come out and handed the trophy to his daughter.
Not for the first time, he was glad to find out that he had been wrong.
Man, I really need to get off the Feels Train this month; it's starting to get ridiculous.
Now, originally, my plan for today was actually going to be something nice and lighthearted, but then someone over on Tumblr posted about how shitty the comics and LOK treated Katara and how the show's flippant attitude towards Katara's necklace was indicative of that and a few of my mutuals and I got to talking about it and the rage started to boil and I might have been a bit buzzed (on anger and feels as much as alcohol), so I sat down and slammed out what you just read. In the light of day, I found I still liked it, so it went through a hell of a lot of editing and reworking and today, I decided that it was still pretty good, so here it is!
On the subject of spankings and the like, it's important to remember that outside of the West - and even then, it's not even the entire West - the idea that parents dealing out the occasional spanking and/or wooden-spoon-to-the-head might be child abuse is considered ludicrous. I mean, my sister-in-law's boyfriend once expressed that opinion about my Mexican mother-in-law's love of a swung chancla (a kind of sandal that Latino parents are fond of hurling at their kids), and my MIL outright laughed in his face because she thought he was joking. So, try not to get too hung up on that, yeah? And please don't start debating it in the comments.
Also, for those playing the home game, "cruising for a bruising" is something my Mom used to say to me when I was toeing The Line. That and, "you're skating on thin ice, Russell."
What else, what else...so, I'm thinking that I should post a few chapters of my WIP at the end of this month, give you guys a taste. Would anyone be interested in that? My wife has read most of what I've got, and she thinks it's great, but I'm, like, nervous about posting something in that unfinished state, you know? But if you guys are interested, I will happily share, because I'm a writer and thus a whore.
Moving on! In tomorrow's episode, we finally get off the Feels Train as Zuko and Katara sit on a log and wonder when their lives became soap operas. Stay tuned!
