Chapter Text
When Opal was about eight years old, she had asked to be trained in the nonbending martial arts. She had no real interest in fighting—always having preferred more peaceful activities like her older brothers—but seeing as though she could not invent, paint, or metalbend, she figured that becoming a competent fighter would be her only chance at staying relevant.
Her mother had indulged the request, guiding her through stance training and having her practice simple katas. But after she had taken a bad fall during one session, resulting in a sprained wrist and bloody nose, the lessons stopped abruptly.
Opal had not been the sort of child taken to screaming tantrums, running away, or hunger strikes. Nonbenders learned to take up less space; she and Junior were always the best behaved of the siblings. But when her mother put an end to her training, she had raged. Hot tears rolled down her cheeks, and she stormed all the way to the tram station on the edge of the estate, mustering the courage to get on the rail and go somewhere, and ignoring the kind pleading of the guards who offered to bring her home. She missed lunch and dinner and would have stayed out all night, stewing in her frustration, had her father not come down to get her.
"She thinks I can't do anything!" she had said as soon as her father sat down beside her on the cold metal bench.
He'd rested a comforting hand on her back. "Sweetheart, your mother thinks you are very capable—"
"Then why won't she train me?" Opal had asked. "Wing and Wei and Kuvira have training accidents all the time. She throws rocks at them!"
Her father sighed, removing his glasses to clean them on the end of his tunic, the way he often did when considering a particularly challenging mathematical problem. "Opal, you are your mother's entire word. If anything ever happened to you, I don't think she'd survive it," he told her. "I know she can be a bit overprotective sometimes, but she only worries because she loves you so much."
Opal had taken her father's word for it, grabbed his hand, and went back home to fall into her mother's arms. After seeing the tortured look on her face, the concerned forehead creases that aged her by decades, she never mentioned the lessons again.
She hadn't realized it then, but it was at that moment that she accepted a love like closed doors, a life filled with pressed flowers and pretty half-truths. Had she known it at the time, would she have fought harder?
It was nearly midnight, but the dome around the house was still down, even though all the others in the city had gone up at the usual time. Huan was out on the lawn with his easel, painting an abstract rendition of the night sky, and the twins had decided to hold a late-night power disc match. Opal wanted nothing more than to be jubilant like them and take this rare opportunity to stargaze without question, but she couldn't help but consider how odd it was for the domes to be down this late—and on a Wednesday night, no less.
She had been on her way to ask one of the guards on duty—hoping they might mistake her for someone who should to know things—when she caught sight of her mother pacing up and down the foyer. She continued for a minute or so before a young guard approached her.
"Would you like for us to raise them, ma'am?" he asked.
"No, leave them down, Hong-Li," her mother replied with an impatient edge to her voice. "She said she'd be back before tomorrow."
Hong-Li—who only looked a year or so older than Opal herself—was visibly shaken by his boss' displeasure. "I...um, would you like for us to try radioing the captain? Maybe we could find out what's keeping her."
"They didn't bring radios. It was too much of a risk." Opal saw her mother start wringing her hands like she hadn't since great-grandma Poppy's health began to fail. She caught herself soon after and clasped her hands in front of her, but the pacing only resumed. "Just leave them down until she's back or I say otherwise."
"Yes, ma'am!" Hong-Li gave a short bow and then left to continue his rounds.
Once he was gone, her mother stopped in the middle of the foyer, looking unusually small in contrast with the long hallway and colored glass windows that extended from ceiling to floor. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes for a moment, and exhaled deeply.
"Opal, sweetie, I know you're there."
Opal started, suddenly feeling quite foolish for lurking in the stairwells. "Mom, are you alright?" she asked once she had made her way down the steps. "You seem stressed."
"I'm fine." She gave a fragmented smile that was meant to reassure her. "I've just been preoccupied with...making arrangements for the delegation from Omashu."
Opal did all she could to keep the incredulity from showing on her face. She knew from experience that she would need to meet her mother where she was. "Maybe I can help you plan for it," she said. "I'll bring some tea up to your study and we can work out some of the details."
"Thank you, sweetheart," she said, clasping Opal's hands. "I'd like that."
Fifteen minutes later, they were sipping chamomile tea on green couches and planning the menu for the king's welcome feast.
"Maybe the elephant-koi on the first day," Opal proposed. "And we can have the kitchen pair it with a papaya salad."
"King Yudai always preferred lobster-crab," her mother said offhandedly.
"Lobster-crab it is, then," Opal said, making a note in the planner.
"And we'll have to have a pork roast," her mother added before taking a sip of her tea.
Opal tilted her head to the side, her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Mom, you don't eat pork," she pointed out. In fact, the only people in the house who did were the twins, who only knew the taste of it because Grandma Toph had given them exposure just before she disappeared.
Her mom made a face and then gave a small shrug. "I don't, but Yudai loves the stuff. He always wants it after he travels."
"It sounds like you know the King of Omashu pretty well," Opal said.
Her mother laughed a little. "Well, we were engaged once."
Opal blinked a few times, searching her mom's face for any signs of a joke. "You were what ?"
"Come on. I must have told you this story a million times."
Opal's lips flattened into a tight line. No, she probably told Kuvira, who she had actually brought with her on her last state visit to Omashu two years ago. But it would be unhelpful in the extreme to bring up the guard captain now. "It's late," she said, feigning a yawn. "Remind me?" It had never taken much to draw a story out of her mother.
"I met him while I was living with my grandparents," she explained with a wistful sigh. Opal knew that both of Grandma Toph's parents had passed away years ago. "My grandfather had business in Omashu, so they brought me to court, knowing that I'd probably skip town if they didn't. While he made his contracts, my Grandma Poppy dressed me up in silk and gold and took me to the king's earthbending tournament. Before the first round, King Yudai—well, he was Prince Yudai back then—stopped right in front of me and asked me for my favor."
"Your what?" Opal asked, drawing more laughter from her mother.
"I had no clue either! Toph certainly didn't raise us to be aware of the rules of noble courtship." She shook her head. "He was asking for me to give him a token of mine—like a silk sash or a hairpin—to bring him luck in the tournament. I didn't have anything like that, so I took my wrist guard and bent it into a bracelet with patterns of badgermoles and earth discs. Metalbending was rare in this region back then, so I suppose I left an impression." She nibbled the edge of her lip, remembering. "He won every match that day, but only because I wasn't competing."
"And then he just proposed?" Opal asked, her eyebrows shooting up.
"After a few months of courtship," she said. "We went on a few chaperoned excursions—some in Omashu, some in Gaoling. He even took me to Ember Island once."
"But you're not Queen of Omashu," Opal pointed out, wondering whether her mother could be exaggerating. "What happened? Did you not love him?"
"I think I did at the time," her mother said, staring out the window, up at the starlit sky. "But I was seventeen years old. I hadn't lived yet, and I knew that if I married into royalty, I never would. So a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday, I ran away and joined a traveling circus."
Opal just blinked slowly. "Unbelievable."
A circus performer? An almost-queen? What else had her mother been before Zaofu?
She had been poised to ask one of about a million follow-up questions when Hong-Li came into the room, bowing to them both. "Ma'am, the captain and her team have returned."
Her mother stood instantly, relief and anxiety dueling for control of her countenance. "Where—"
"Seeing that her team receives medical care, ma'am, and then on her way up to you."
"Thank the spirits," she said quietly. "Opal, would you mind if—"
"On my way out," Opal said, knowing well what was coming next. Wherever Kuvira had been, whatever she had done, would be yet another closed door.