Katara may be a doctor, a wife, and a mother of two, but somehow, none of that prepared her for when her daughter asked her what the c-word meant. Based on a true story.

Set in the Cop/Doctor AU introduced in A Little Bit of This, and a Little Bit of That, in the entries Strangers, Secret Lovers, Escape, Wedding, Ash, Pregnancy, Forbidden, and Complementary.

Content Warning: Repeated uses of a word that starts with a c and rhymes with runt, but to be fair, it's a confused eleven-year-old asking her mom what it means.

Letters

"MOM, WHAT DOES CUNT MEAN?"

Later that night, after the girls had gone to bed and she finally had a quiet moment with her husband, Katara would struggle far more than an honest-to-La doctor should to describe the sound she made when her eleven-year-old flu-stricken daughter asked her that question. She would test and discard many possibilities, gesturing wildly through the air with a precariously full glass of wine, while Zuko would sip his beer and put forward his own candidates for the job. Eventually, she would take a big gulp of wine and shoot a finger at him and point out that, for a homicide detective, he was being maddeningly imprecise, at which point he would counter that, as a doctor, surely she was far more familiar with the sounds of human beings choking on various liquids than he was, after all, if he ever found a person who had choked, it was generally long after the sounds had stopped. Naturally, she would be forced to concede the point in a way that sounded like she had conceded nothing at all, even though she knew her husband saw through her as easily as she saw through him.

In the end, the sound she settled on as being the closest to what her body produced when Korra uttered the word cunt right as Katara was taking a sip of tea was something along the lines of hrgle-blergle-hrk. Later, the medical part of her mind would diagnose the cause as a gulp of liquid combined with shock, exacerbated by an instinctual reaction by which her body made matters worse by refusing to spew the tea all over the living room.

At the time, she was just glad that she hadn't choked to death.

"Alright," Zuko said, taking a pull from his beer, "now that that's settled, paint the scene for me."

Katara settled back into her chair, wine glass carefully balanced on her stomach. It really was a wonderful night, she mused, light and cool, the trees whispering in a soft, gentle breeze that smelled of fresh cut grass and the salty heaviness of Yue Bay. All around them in the dark, the suburbs of Republic City pulsed in the night, and the waxing moon hung high up in the sky, its pull sending sparks rippling through Katara's veins.

These moments out on the back patio, sprawled in reclining lawn chairs side-by-side with her husband, sipping adult beverages and their two daughters sound asleep (or, at least pretending to be so), were some of Katara's favorite. She loved her daughters, loved her career, loved her nice quiet family life, sometimes she even loved the dog that was busy dozing inside, now too old and lazy to do a quick patrol of the fence, for all that the dog had long since decided that Zuko was her one true love, never mind that it was Katara who had picked her at the shelter.

And yet, it was these fleeting moments snatched from the hustle and bustle of life in Republic City that made Katara feel truly at peace, when it was just her and her boy, together, like they had always been, like they would always be, dissecting and picking apart their days.

Speaking of which…

"Right, so, there I am, sprawled on the sofa, Korra nestled into my side, you know how she is when she's not feeling well."

Zuko chuckled. "Yeah…she's a big tough girl, right up until she gets a sniffle and then she's all, I love you Mommy, I love you Daddy, can we watch the 'Onions Movie' one more time?"

Katara gave a scoff worthy of Toph, her former roommate and current best friend. "Please. It's never just one more time."

"True…but hey, it's better than that stupid rainbow horse show that Ursa's obsessed with." That being Ursa, their youngest, all of eight-years-old.

"Hey now, My Little Ostrich-Pony is a lovely show that teaches good messages in a wholesome, family-friendly way."

"Alright then, want to go watch a few episodes?"

"Gods no. Anyways, there I am, curled up with Korra, sipping tea from a thermos and watching the umpteenth episode of Curious Gao-"

Her husband groaned. "Gods, I hate that stupid little monkey."

"You'll hear no argument from me. As I was saying, you and Ursa had just left for the movies, and thanks for getting her out of the house tonight, by the way, I don't know how you handled both of them last night."

"Oh, it wasn't so bad. It's all about subtle redirection and learning to tune out the thousandth repetition of Daddy, I'm bored."

"Ugh, tell me about it. But yeah, there we are, Korra's sniffling and watching that stupid monkey gambol about and I'm sipping my tea, wondering what I'm going to whip up for dinner, thinking about calling your mother to see how she's doing," seeing as Katara's mother-in-law had managed to catch the flu from her namesake, who had been stricken with the illness the week before, "when, just, I swear to La, out of nowhere, our daughter, our eleven-year-old daughter, I feel like adding, just kind of popped up, looked at me with this serious look in her eye, and asked, in this calm, utterly rational, somewhat confused tone of voice, Mom, what does cunt mean?"

Katara quickly shot a look at her husband, just in time to see him try and hide his growing smile with his beer.

She rolled her eyes and shot him the bird. "Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, I'm already praying to the gods that Ursa asks you what a penis is while you're in a supermarket checkout line."

Zuko's incipient smile died a quick death. "Joy. So, what'd you do?"

"Well, first, I tried not to die, seeing as I almost choked to death on my tea, and then, after the coughing fit subsided, I started composing the angry voicemail I was going to leave on your sister's phone."

"Hey now, Korra could just as easily have learned that word from Toph."

"No, because Toph would've made sure that Korra knew what it meant."

"Okay, fair. What then?"

"Naturally, I asked her where she'd heard that word, fulling expecting to hear her say, Oh, Auntie Zula shouted it while she was driving us to the park the other day and she told me to ask Dad but I forgot to ask Dad so I'm asking you, or, I don't know, something similar."

Zuko sighed. "That is how the girls learned the f-word."

"No," Katara demurred, raising a solitary finger into the air, "that's how they learned dickhead. They learned the f-word from Suki." Suki, naturally, was Zuko's partner in Homicide, one of his best friends since the Academy.

"And they learned shit from you."

"Look, I can't always control who's in earshot when I stub my toe, okay? And since when did you get so high-and-mighty, Mr. Told My Wife Her Tits Were Looking Fabulous Without Checking to Make Sure that Our Daughters Were Not in the Kitchen with Her?"

"Well," Zuko said, rubbing the back of his neck and looking suitably embarrassed, "your tits were looking fabulous that day."

"Psh, you always think my tits look fabulous."

"Well, they do! That doesn't invalidate my point."

Katara looked down at the objects in question, grabbed one, gave it a squeeze, and decided that, two children and the ravages of time notwithstanding, her husband was right, her tits were fabulous. "Anyways, so I ask her where she learned that word, and she said, Oh, in your book."

Zuko frowned. "Since when did you read books that have that word in them?"

"That's what I thought! So, I asked her, Well, honey, what book are you talking about? And, to my surprise, she got up, making sure to keep her blanket wrapped tight around her shoulders, and padded off to her room, returning with none other than The Complete and Unedited Correspondence of Fire Lord Zuko and Fire Lady Katara, Volume Three."

Zuko's eyes flew wide. "Wait, what?! I mean, since when did she start reading that?"

"We did tell the girls that they could read anything that was on Mommy and Daddy's bookshelves."

"True, but, come on, that set is thick and leather bound and each volume even has one of those stupid little silk bookmarks attached to the spine. What kind of eleven-year-old would pick that up?"

"Um…both of us, at eleven?"

"Okay, point, still, though, our girls are normal kids. Also, since when was the c-word in those books?"

Katara popped an eyebrow. "I thought you said you read them?"

Zuko suddenly became very interested in his beer. "Well, I mean, I definitely…you know…skimmed them at some point…"

Katara giggled. "Uh huh. But, back to my story, Korra drops the book into my lap and opens it up, she had even marked the page where she'd found the word, and sure enough, there it was, staring me right in the face."

And it had been, too. The monarchs who had fought beside Avatar Aang and helped pull the world from the destruction and chaos of the Hundred Years' War had, over the course of their long marriage, developed the habit of passing short little notes to each other, in addition to the reams of letters they had written any time one or the other was away. For reasons that Katara had never fully understood, their five children, when it came time to collect and preserve their parents' correspondence, had decided to hunt down as many of these little notes as humanly possible and publish them for the world to read.

The whys and wherefores weren't important, though. What was important, was the particular note that had somehow survived almost three centuries to one day be read by an eleven-year-old girl named for a long-dead Avatar, daughter of a brand new Zuko and Katara, though, oddly enough, neither Katara nor her husband were actually named for the famous couple (at least, not directly; both "Zuko" and "Katara" were traditional names in their families). The scholarly note that accompanied the text in question explained that, according to research, the note had been written while the Fire Nation's House of Peers was locked in heated debate over a bill that the Fire Lady had been heavily involved in. The note went on to explain that, at the time of the debate, the Fire Lady was heavily pregnant with what turned out to be twin girls, and so was watching the debate from a private gallery, high above the clouds of smoke that any large gathering of Fire Nation citizens tended to produce, especially in those days. Apparently, a rather elderly member of the house, a Lady Fukuyama, had been in the middle of a rather long-winded, tiresome speech, a habit she was rather infamous for, when the Fire Lady had scratched out her note, handed it to a lady-in-waiting, and sent it down to the Fire Lord, who had, according to credible accounts, burst into hysterical laughter upon receiving it.

The note read:

I swear by all the gods, both above and below, that this sanctimonious cunt is on a one-woman mission to destroy forever my belief in the principle of free speech. If she doesn't shut up soon, I'm going to go find a barrel of rancid cabbages and start throwing.

Back on the patio, Katara watched her husband take all of this in, sipping his beer while a calm, rather contemplative expression settled across his face.

"So," he said, "did the Lady Fukuyama ever shut up?"

Katara shrugged. "The scholar's note didn't say, which is a shame, because now I really want to know."

"Same. So, what did you tell our daughter?"

Katara tossed back the last gulp of wine in her glass. "What else could I say? I told her that it was a very bad word, especially when used towards a woman, that Fire Lady Katara shouldn't have used it three centuries ago and that Korra definitely shouldn't ever use it now."

"I see…" Zuko polished off his beer and set it down on the patio. "Did she point out that, while she understood what you were saying, you still hadn't actually answered her question?"

Katara rolled her eyes. "Have you met our daughters? Of course that's what she said."

"And then what did you do?"

Katara didn't answer at first. Instead, she set her empty wine glass down, rolled herself out of her chair, sauntered over to her husband (making sure to put an extra sway in her hips, because she knew how to press his buttons), and slowly, carefully, seductively, settled herself into his lap and draped herself across his chest. She buried her hands in his hair and pulled him forward and laid a kiss that had them both gasping for breath before she was done. Naturally, it had the desired effect, judging by the growing lump that was starting to poke into her thigh and by the way her husband's hands were now slipping up underneath her shirt.

By the time all was said and done, they were back in their bedroom, door firmly locked, breathless, spent, and covered in sweat. Katara was tracing lazy circles on her husband's chest, watching him slowly recover his senses enough to start to realize that she had neglected to answer his question, when there was a knock at the door and a small, eight-year-old voice saying, "Hey, Daddy? I had a bad dream."

Zuko sighed and threw on sweat pants and a shirt and padded out to chase the monsters from the depths of their youngest daughter's closet. Katara took the opportunity to throw on one of her husband's hoodies and a pair of yoga pants and headed off to check on Korra, barely suppressing the urge to start whistling a jaunty tune.

Because, see, when her eldest daughter had pointed out that Katara had managed to not answer the original question, Katara had done the only thing a parent can do in such a situation:

She had told her to ask her father in the morning.

So, first things' first: Apologies for the use of the c-word. I stand by this particular usage, because it's directly inspired by the time that I asked my mother was an orgy was in the check out line at Tom Thumb (because the National Enquirer always has interesting words on the cover and eleven-year-olds have no filter) and kids just do crap like this sometimes, but still, let me me clear:

That word is horrible and derogatory and should never be used...which has never stopped children from asking their parents what it means at unexpected times, but hey, if we all stopped using it, maybe kids would stop asking what it means. See? Just doing my bit for human progress.

Anyhoo, I said that this was based on a true story, and that was a lie: It's based on several true stories. For example, inappropriate questions asked by children in supermarket check-out lines? My mom used to dread check-out lines for that very reason. Little kids cutely asking the meaning of bad words, words that they almost always learned from some member of their family? That's just life, yo. And, least but not least, a married couple going out on their patio after their kid(s) finally go to bed, to sip adult beverages and pick apart their day?

Guys, that's what my wife and I do every damn night. It's pretty much our favorite part of the day, and here in Texas, the heat seems to have finally broken and we're super stoked to talk about this work and you guys and what cute things our son did today, because I'm doing a summer internship which means I can't be a stay-at-home dad right now and it's fucking killing me you guys, ugh. But I love my family and we're going strong, and that is the final true story that this little piece is based off of.

And I think that's enough sugar for you guys to digest tonight. Love you guys! Keep the reviews coming!

MOVING ON! In tomorrow's episode, a heavily pregnant Fire Lady Katara sips tea and finds herself debating the merits of women's suffrage. Stay tuned!