Chapter Four
Paiyya Lee stood there, momentarily unable to think, her mind stunned into abject uselessness by the sight in front of her. Her prodigal daughter, gone from her life for nearly four years, stood before her once more. She was struck by the sheer presence her daughter seemed to project. It was a presence that seemed disconnected from the…incongruous, to say the least, uniform she wore. No, it was something else about her. It was something in the way she held herself, the way she took in the room, the piercing look staring out of gray eyes she saw every day.
"Hello, mother," she said again, softly, and her eyes squinted in obvious pain. "I'm sure this must come as quite a shock."
"I-I should say so," she said stuttering over her words, her mind, still recovering from the shock registered the obvious pain. Then she remembered something the officer, the other officer, had said to her. That the officer who had discovered her husband's body had come to pay her condolences. Her mind fervently, desperately, hoped that another young woman would come through the door, but she would have been here by now. In her years as an investigator for the High Sheriff and eventually High Sheriff herself, of the Barony of Black Thunder, she knew that finding a dead body was emotionally jarring even for those sworn to uphold the Firelord's Peace.
But to discover the body of your father, who was closer to you than anyone, and the urge to hold her daughter close to her came upon her anew, overriding all questions. Whatever had transformed her daughter from the twelve-year-old girl barely into her womanhood to the competent looking young officer she was now, had been the straw that had come perilously close to breaking the komodo rhino's back. She tried to spare me further grief, at least for now, by making me think she was busy with the investigation, but what she really wanted was for me to not twig onto the fact that she apparently had some sort of breakdown.
"Everyone else in the room get out," Paiyya ordered, finding the strength to sound vaguely commanding once again. "I need to speak to my daughter alone for a while."
She watched as the other woman looked at Ty Lee to confirm whether or not she should go with them. It was a move she'd expected of course, she could recognize a commander's right hand when she saw one by now or she wasn't nearly as good a judge of character as she supposed. Ty Lee nodded and the young officer led Ty Lee's sisters out of the room, leaving them alone and bathed in the relative warmth and the light of the sun coming in through the window.
"So," her daughter said finally. "You must have a lot of questions for me."
That's the understatement of the century, she thought to herself. Where've you been the last three years? What are you doing in that uniform? How'd you end up finding your father's corpse? She shook her head.
"Where have you been all this time?" The last letter we got from you after that business at school was that you'd left it and had gone to make your own way in the world, to 'find yourself' in other worlds."
"Well," she said, and there was an unmistakable quiver in her voice, and years of reading human behavior told her that her daughter was undergoing one of the weak points that afflicted every human at some point their life, and, that more than that, and the realization stabbed at her heart, that her daughter had been wounded soul deep in more ways than just this. "I certainly found that at least."
Her daughter slumped down in her chair, and exhaled deeply. "I suppose I should start at the beginning."
Ty Lee opened the door and slipped out, feeling…somewhat better. Finally telling someone everything from the beginning, had improved her mood somewhat. The problem was that when you were at the bottom there was no place to go but up. By no sane standard could she be considered healed, but she at least she felt better than she had a couple hours earlier. She walked out, half-braced for a tidal wave of eager questions from her sisters, and at the very least Michiko. When she looked around, she saw Kyoshi Warrior door guards on each room, presumably her sisters' rooms. The twelve men and women all looked impressive and stony faced as they stood at ease with their hands clasped behind their back.
Michiko stood up as soon as she closed the door. "How'd it go?"
"Surprisingly well," Ty Lee said, a ghost of a smile on her face. "She seemed to genuinely want to get to know me again." The ghost of a smile disappeared. "She seemed genuinely ashamed that she was never able to keep me safe from Azula."
"It's a terrible thing for a mother to know her child suffered and she was unable to protect her." She winced in shared pain with her friend, whose husband and daughter had died, while her battalion had been fighting a raiding force advancing overland from Saltpans, in an ultimately successful attempt to push them back to the ocean and prevent them linking up with the pirates already fighting the Kyoshi Warriors for control of the town.
The battle had ultimately saved the rest of the valley, and she'd been twice mentioned in dispatches for both her valor and, most importantly, her cunning in the battle, quite the achievement for someone who'd been a platoon commander, been a fully commissioned officer in the first place, for only a month.
But no amount of accolades would ever make losing her daughter and her husband okay. That pain, even if she remarried, even if she had another child, would follow her until the day Ty Lee finally laid her to rest.
Ty Lee opened her mouth to say…something, but she realized that, ultimately, there was nothing she could say that hadn't already been said.
"Moving on," Michiko said suddenly, as if to banish the memories. "What do you want to do now?"
Ty Lee looked at Michiko as if she'd suddenly sprouted a second head that spoke in dirty rhymes. "'What do I want to do?'" She repeated. "What I want to do is stay on top of this and skewer whoever did this."
"We can't, unfortunately" Michiko said. "Suki's orders still stand. Lieutenant Colonel Zama called me, and me alone, in, and only temporarily, as she is Suki's junior and can only…reinterpret her orders for forty-eight barring an all-out assault. That passed a long time ago. We're civilians again. At least until New Year's."
Ty Lee opened her mouth to say, "Fine, then we'll investigate as private citizens," but she got as far as "Fi-,"
"And before you suggest the two of us become tough renegades out of cheesy ballads, I would like to remind you that outside a major war, that only works in cheesy ballads. Not that I don't find it tempting, but if we cross paths with the local forces, we'll just get thrown in the stocks, and we won't find out who murdered your father in their will we?"
Ty Lee sighed, though her last words piqued her interest. "What do you suggest we do?" She asked, carefully schooling her voice.
"We stay subtle, and stay on vacation. And if finding some way to enjoy our vacation takes us to the seedier areas of town where the people who know the people who may or may not have assassinated your father roost, that's only because the dangerous, rough-and-tumble atmosphere is more suited to our tastes."
Abruptly, Ty Lee's stomach rumbled, and Michiko smirked. "Let's go downstairs and eat first though. As much as the atmosphere appeals to us, the food is piss poor..."
