THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR LOVELY REVIEWS + FAVES + FOLLOWS :D i've only been writing fanfic since march and you make me so happy 3
okay, so: chapter 7 is on its way, I swear; but in the meantime, here's a short intermission. It takes place during part 1 of chapter 7, which, with luck, will be up in a week (and without luck, within two.) This is all Noatak and Korra having father-daughter bonding time
intermission
Korra can't stop thinking about how quickly Mako and Bolin slip into an easy playfulness when Noatak is not around. First they're tight-lipped, stiff, almost distant; a cross-armed winter sets in and frost collects. And then in the space of a blink, they thaw into a giddy season of spring: Mako ruffling Bolin's hair, Bolin fixing it, Mako ruffling it again; Bolin dropping Pabu onto Mako's head as he does crunches. An almost ritualistic exchange of insults and mockery that roll lightning-quick off their tongues: who needs you when I have a box of matches whatever my precious sugar dumpling shut up you burnt rooster cluck goes the baby turtle duck and it ends with Bolin yelling "who's the baby turtle duck now, huh?!" as he wrestles his brother down with exuberant indignation.
She's curled in the armchair as jazz crackles out of the radio, skimming through her thoughts, turning each one like a page in a picture book. A trumpet squeals through a dizzying array of notes and Noatak reaches out from the couch without looking up from his papers and fumbles for the dial, softens the music; a smooth fade of sound. The yellow lamplight glints off his glasses as he tilts them with a precise hand.
Korra pauses on Mako's smile, the one that means Bolin, not the cheeky roughhousing grin but the faint one that starts deep behind his eyes and opens slowly, shyly; rare like a wildflower growing between the cracks of a sidewalk. He loves his brother.
Her gaze wanders around the room, at the bookshelf packed with volumes on bending theory and government, encyclopedias, history books, her sparse collection of novels; the framed charcoal sketches on the wall of polar animals, smudged and blackened, as familiar to her as the sound of her own voice. Noatak doesn't change much about the space they live in.
Korra wonders if she was always meant to be an only child.
And Tarrlok is her uncle, Councilman Tarrlok, who Korra knows only as grainy pictures in the newspaper and a slick voice on the radio and not as her father's brother. She looks at Noatak - twenty-six years, he said, hasn't talked to Tarrlok in twenty-six years - there are fine grey lines in his hair, his leathered skin aged into aniline, an unfelt weariness in the way he sighs, thumbs his lip in thought. It's hard to imagine him any younger, like he was made this way, born this way, big and stern and gravelly, already in the grip of his revolution. But she knows, or feels it at least - he used to smile more.
"Dad," Korra says, and he hums in response: hnn, barely paying attention as he frowns at the blueprints on the page.
"Dad, what… what were you and Uncle Tarrlok like as kids?"
He looks up from his papers and turns to her, still frowning.
"What would possess you to ask me that?"
"I dunno. Just curious," she says, tilting her head onto her curled hand; "you never talk about that kind of stuff."
"You're right. I don't," he says shortly, narrowing his grey eyes at his papers, and Korra huffs and rolls her head away onto her shoulder. Typical answer. But she wants to press him, make him give her something, at least.
"Come on, you never tell me anything! Just… tell me one thing, okay? Just one?" she says, "please, Daddy?"
Noatak's chest lifts as he sighs, deep and quiet, thinking; and then he puts the papers on his lap, stares at a point above the floor, peaks his fingers together in a splayed gesture of prayer and brings them to his lips.
He blinks and smiles to himself, breathing out a single weightless laugh: heh.
"Fine. We were - we tended to behave, except with each other," he says, and Korra watches a dreamy look pass over him, pacific and mild; his eyes the color of a calm day at sea.
"When he was five, I convinced him that he was adopted," he says, "that our mother and father found him in a turtle seal den and that we would soon return him to the wild to be with his kind…"
Korra snorts with laughter; the image that comes to mind is Tarrlok squeezed and hunched into a rocky den in the snow, surrounded by squawking turtle seals.
"If I recall correctly, he started to cry," Noatak adds, grinning broadly. He rubs his chin and smirks, mouth half-open, nodding slightly, and his voice takes on color of simple, unbothered nostalgia, clean as fresh snow.
"And Tarrlok had - he had quite the baby face, round plum cheeks and big wet eyes, blushed easily - but Noatak, I don't wanna live with the turtle seals, I wanna stay with you," he says, in a childish whine. And Korra laughs again, but does not fail to catch the slip of his expression into a stony thoughtfulness, his eyes widening as they follow something to a horizon that she can't see.
"You were mean, Dad," she prods lightly, and he rolls his eyes at her, waving off her comment with a toss of his hand.
"Nonsense. Harmless juvenile tricks that were all returned in kind. Once, he hid strips of raw fish in the pockets of my parka and so seal penguins followed me around all day, nosing and chirping at me, damn insistent creatures. I could not figure it out - " and Korra bursts out laughing again, imagining a gaggle of penguin seals waddling after her father, swarming around his legs, what an insufferable affront to his dignity, Tarrlok you whelp.
"- but I would do better than mere penguins. Tarrlok hates stewed sea prunes. Detests them. So I dosed his milk with a seaweed powder that turned his tongue green and told him it was only the beginning sign of a terrible disease… and the only cure was to eat stewed seaweed prunes."
Noatak chortles and bites his lip; he takes off his glasses and cleans them on the edge of his shirt, the navy fabric pulling away in slack curves from his frame. Korra can't help but sympathize with Tarrlok; stewed sea prunes are vile.
"Naturally, our mother asked him why he was stuffing himself with sea prunes, and - she tended to encourage us - so that night I go to bed only to find it strewn with - "
" - stewed sea prunes," Korra giggles, and he nods widely at her.
"They were everywhere. In the pillow, between the sheets. There was a horrendous squish. My bed reeked of sea prunes for a week. The injustice of it all was that I disliked them just as much as he did."
"Nah, that was totally fair, Dad," Korra says, and Noatak clicks his tongue and scoffs: hardly.
"Tarrlok and I had our moments, but we were good-natured enough to each other. We only… had each other, since we were not very well-acquainted with the local village children," he muses, "our father was rather jealous of his privacy."
He says it casually, simply, merely a detail of the story; but Korra hears the echo behind the words, of something very different from light-hearted reminiscence in the wistful baritone tones of his voice. This is the first time he has ever volunteered anything about his father, anything other than a far-eyed look and silence.
"What was he - " she starts, and Noatak rises abruptly; rolling up off the couch, throwing the papers aside, moving to stand in front of her. His eyes are struck with a pleasant brightness as he cups her face in his palm, earnest and loose.
"You still need to be taught how to waterbend," he says, as a sudden thought; and Korra can't help it - she gasps and breaks into an open-mouthed smile, a breathless joy flooding through her: waterbending. Waterbending.
"Really?! When?!"
He grins and kisses her on the cheek.
"Soon," Noatak says, "I'll take you into the mountains. The lakes will suit us well. Now, off to bed with you."
He thumbs her nose and Korra flinches and giggles and raises her arms to wrap them around his neck. Noatak lifts her off the armchair, carries her to her bed, smacks her with another goodnight kiss - and the feeling is like coming home, to the warm promise of an embrace from someone who loves you, coming home and hearing your name in their sun-colored voice for the first time in years. Like waking up, with dawn dressing the sky in blue-white lambskin light, on the first morning after you are home again, home to who you are, who you were; the whole of your self in your hands again.
Waterbending! She sleeps, dreams floating, rippling as silken fine-petal lotuses on the soft glass water of thought. Waterbending, at last.
wow Korra calls him "Daddy" and Noatak folds like a house of cards, good job even you can't resist those big blue eyes. they needed some fluffy moments.
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