Rating: PG, probably; some unpleasant concepts - aftermath of an earthquake - but nothing especially explicit.
Characters/Pairing: And, at long last, the Yue chapter. Contains mentions of Yue/Hahn, Yue/Sokka, Yue/Kuei, and hints of Yue/Ty Lee.
Summary: Some of the missing and/or dead mothers of Avatar: who they might have been, and things they might have done or never did. Each chapter will be sort of its own five-things fic.
Disclaimer: Places and people you recognize from canon are not mine.
Acknowledgements: GIANT THANK-YOU to my sister, for the beautiful art (unfortunately, I can't embed it here!) and the constant nagging. And, of course, to the ladiesbigbang challenge on Dreamwidth, for leading me to actually get off my butt and post fic.
Other Notes: Apologies for the lateness! This was ready to go up yesterday, but a new error prevented it. Obviously, this is a small deviation from the theme, but this is the last chapter (the last one I'm planning to write, anyway, though I suppose it's not impossible for there to be more at some point) and it's not Yue's fault she died before she could even get the chance to be a dead mom. So. This fic is now functionally complete! However, if you've got another mom you think I should have written about and I didn't, please do message me/leave a review to tell me who, and I may add some more chapters.
(Five sets of children Yue never raised.)
One:
Hahn is arrogant and unbending; the times it starts to bother her, she takes three deep breaths and reminds herself that she knew it when she married him. Besides, underneath it, he is not unkind - only too occupied with what other people think of him, too willing to do something only because it is well thought of, and not because he thinks it worth doing.
Taami's birth softens him, though, and when Yue puts his daughter in his arms for the first time and sees the look that comes over his face, she thinks she is starting to understand what her mother meant when she said you never stopped getting to know people.
Taami is very like her father in a lot of ways, except that Hahn was an only child, which Yue sometimes thinks is the reason he never learned to modulate the worst in him when he was young, and Taami has Dakan. By the time she is eight, she is grudgingly polite to anyone her little brother so much as smiles at, and calmly horrible to everyone else.
Dakan, by contrast, is sunny-sweet to everybody, except the boys he punches when he is thirteen because they say they hope Taami will fall into the ocean and freeze someday soon.
Two:
Yue wishes she could say that she knew beforehand; that she sensed that there were two, with a mother's quiet intuition. But she doesn't know she's having twins until Katara says, "It's a boy, Yue, he's so - oh - uh, wait a second-" and motions frantically for Suki.
"What? What's going on?" Sokka yells from outside, and Yue can't help but laugh; he's been pacing out there for hours, too squeamish to come in and too nervous to leave. "Everybody's still alive, right?"
"Not if you keep distracting me," Katara shouts back, amused, and then nods to Yue. "Okay, push," she says, and Yue does.
"Twins? Seriously?" Sokka yelps, and then even the specter of blood and sweat and babies isn't enough to keep him out of the room; he charges in the door, a hand over his eyes. "Okay, I'm coming in," he intones. "Everything covered up?"
"I don't see why you're worried," Yue says innocently, "you've seen it all already," and laughs when Sokka splutters.
"Hah," he manages at last, and then looks down at them, strangely somber-eyed. "Is one of them a girl?" he says.
Yue nods, a little curious. "On the left," she says, and tilts her elbow up so that Sokka can take the baby.
Sokka picks her up, careful to keep a hand curled under her head; Katara has lectured him about it at least twenty times since Yue started to show. He stares down at the baby's face, stroking one cheek with his thumb, and says, suddenly serious, "Can we name her Kya?"
"Of course," Yue says, and squeezes his elbow with her free hand.
Three:
The baby is left tucked against the palace wall; she must have been sleeping at first, because no one can remember seeing her be left there, even though Yue finds her because she starts screaming her head off.
The first day, she throws up on Yue twice, refuses three out of five attempts to feed her buffalo yak milk even though all of them are the same temperature and have been prepared exactly the same way, and then falls fast asleep in about a minute flat.
"Being dissatisfied is very hard work," Mother says, sounding fondly amused in the way she always does when she's remembering Yue's childhood. She offers to take Yue's two ruined robes away to be cleaned, but Yue refuses.
"It's the baby's mess," Yue says reluctantly, "and she's my baby."
Mother's eyebrows rise.
"I mean - for now," Yue stumbles. "Until someone comes for her."
It's ridiculous, she thinks later, scrubbing the last of the vomit out of her second-best robe. The baby is horrid, picky, and clearly ill-tempered. She's like Hahn in miniature, but more forthright; and Yue has to stop scrubbing for a moment to laugh at the mental image that thought gives her. And, more importantly, she belongs to someone else. Still, when Yue goes to lie down - Mother has advised her to sleep whenever the baby does, or she may never get a moment's rest - she lays out her old spare robes for the next morning.
Four:
Tien turns out a little addlepated; but that doesn't really surprise Yue, considering his father is Kuei. She loves Kuei, but even after his return from his journey to learn more about the world, he's never what you would call sensible.
Bosco is starting to go grey around the muzzle, and his eyes aren't much good anymore, but the bear can still hear well, and when he catches the sound of Tien's voice, he always looks up right away. He loves Tien, and the feeling is mutual; Tien even takes him into the library sometimes, because, according to Tien, he's nice to lie against when you read.
Yue can't say she's ever tried it, but she has to admit that it's probably true.
It causes friction sometimes, of course. Ling Mei tends to think of the library as her domain, and, more importantly, as a place to worship books as they deserve to be worshipped - not to flip through them while you lean on a pet bear.
Five:
"Hey, look," says Ty Lee, nudging Yue's shoulder. "Do you see that?"
Yue does see it: a colorful piece of cloth caught in the space under a couple of boards leaning against a wall. Her heart catches in her throat; she hopes desperately that it isn't part of a body. Aang's fight with Ozai caused an earthquake that tore up a lot of the capital city, but the initial rescue-and-repair phase is almost over, and Yue hasn't had to try to bend the life back into anybody for days. She's not sure she could stand to find one last corpse now.
But it's not a corpse; it's a child. Two of them, actually, both girls, dressed in dusty Fire Nation red and staring up at her with frightened eyes - at least until Ty Lee comes up beside her, wearing red herself, and they both relax.
The taller of the girls has a flurry of cuts on one cheek, and Yue kneels down and twists off the cap on the pouch for her bending water, but then the girl flinches back.
"No, hey, it's all right," Ty Lee says comfortingly. "She's not so bad." She turns a little, and winks at Yue.
Yue doesn't know Ty Lee that well yet. After all, it hasn't been all that long since Ty Lee was still on Azula's side of all this. Sometimes she feels like she's waiting for Ty Lee to suddenly change her mind again. But Ty Lee has been unfailingly friendly, always dimpled and beaming, and willing to do flips and tumbles for the rescued children waiting for their parents; and she keeps smiling at Yue in ways that make Yue's stomach wobble.
Turns out the winking makes it wobble, too.
The girls turn out to be sisters; Ji-Lan and Zhang, Ty Lee tells Yue, when she manages to pry their names out. Zhang is the older one, the taller girl with the cuts, and she lets Yue heal her as long as Ty Lee stays with them. Ji-Lan is the younger, and refuses to talk to anyone but Zhang; not even Ty Lee can get a word out of her. She seems to take a shine to Yue, though, and when they walk back to the temporary shelters set up near the palace, it is with Ji-Lan's hand wrapped tightly around the end of one of Yue's pale braids.