"The Chief's doing what?!" a collective disbelieving whisper came from every officer huddled around Captain Lee's desk at the far side of the squad room. Each knew that if their beloved leader heard them, they'd all be 'randomly selected' for next month's beating-um 'training exercise'.
"She's gonna break her boy." Xun told them from Lee's chair with a shrug, "Send him running before this job ruins him." there was a mummer of sympathetic words for the young Beifong. The general opinion was that he wouldn't last a day against the old Iron Maiden, "Don't count the boy out just yet, she didn't raise him to be a quitter."
"Yeah." Lee, as Bolin's captain, felt it was his duty to stand up for him, "He's tougher than he looks."
"Any kid who can survive childhood with Beifong has to be tougher than he looks." Sergeant Ning pointed out.
"Don't forget that over the years he's convinced her to take in," he used his fingers to count off, "a fire ferret, two teenaged girls, and a sealhound." Xun added, "He's got her figured out." And that was a fact, as impossible as that might seem to the crowd of her underlings.
"But this is Beifong we're talking about." A protest from the crowd came.
"The boy's a Beifong too." Ning pointed that little fact out again.
"It's gonna be interesting, no doubt about it." The retired cop took finished off his coffee and pulled out his wallet, "Twenty yuans on the boy." Republic city's finest watched him walk out in silence before looking at each other, to the money, and to their Chief's office.
"I don't care how tough the boy is...he's going down. Twenty on Beifong." Lee flew into his chair, grabbed paper and wrote down his wager. A captain must be loyal to the officers beneath him, but no law said he had to be on their sides when bets were involved, "Any other gamblers?" Names and yuans came flying in.
"Man, you look horrible, Bo." Team avatar had been nice enough to come and visit him at the station, and they told him that they had a decent meal for him, the first one he'd had in days. What he hadn't been told about was the unwanted concern for his ragged appearance.
"Thank you, Mako." Bolin said with sarcastic sweetness as he trudged into the break room for breakfast, "I worked hard to get this look right." Then he flopped down in the empty chair, "I'm going for a look that says 'this guy is an overworked, underpaid deputy who somehow got thrown into his momboss's tigerdog house and would give his face to Koh to get out of it'. Did I pull it off?"
"Perfectly." Asami nodded, trying to play along with the joke. They always seemed to make bad things easier to bear.
"Oh that's great." He smiled somewhat, before it turned into a frown, "Do you have any idea what that woman's been putting me through?" Bolin whined pathetically as he laid on the table, completely exhausted from the day's work (he hadn't got to sleep and there was still more to do before his class) he got a pat on the back from Korra, a hand squeeze from Asami and a condolence-coffee from Mako.
"She's been making you work around the clock?" Korra guessed with a growl.
"Besides that." a muffled answer came.
"She's yelling at you all the time?" That was Asami's guess.
"Besides that."
"Giving you all the rotten jobs ." Mako hit it right on the head,"Yeah, Bro, we know."
"Do you, Mako? Do you? Let's see, she's made me...round up a rogue flock of rouge armadillochickens," everyone fought to hide their smiles, a lieutenant had gotten a picture of him covered in feathers and noddles, it was beautiful, "She made me babysit a nobleman's bad tempered owlcat," it tried to fly the coop, and he'd gotten a dozen scratches at least, "she made me guard a restroom in City Hall...the restroom, Mako! I stood at attention by the sinks for ten hours." It'd been pretty uncomfortable for both him and the restroom patrons, "I've had to clean the kennels, play the dummy for tackling demonstrations, pick up everyone's lunch. I got randomly selected for the training exercise and I didn't do anything wrong! She makes me extra paperwork every single day. Day before yesterday she said it was because she had to take a team and 'inspect the Riverside Tavern for suspicious activities', then I hear the chorus of 'Secret Tunnel' with sealhound accompaniment in her office six hours later."
"Maybe she was inspecting the drinks and got carried away?" Asami offered a possible explanation, partly to keep the peace in the Beifong family and partly out of guilt. She'd accepted an invitation to the Riverside Tavern from Lin, but hadn't known what she'd done to get out of work early or why she wanted to go back to the station after she'd been cut off.
"Maybe she's just trying to DRIVE ME UP THE WALL!" he shouted, banging his fist on the table for good measure, "She keeps coming up with new ways to torture me. I'd thought she'd start easing off by now, but that woman's relentless!"
…...
"That boy's indomitable!" Lin growled as she saw Bolin get back from his break two minutes early via seismic sense. It upset her that she couldn't nail him for being late, but there was a job that required an officer of his talents on the east side of the city, "Beifong! Get in here!"
"Yes, Chief." Bolin couldn't even bother himself to try and disguise the tired groan that escaped his mouth. He just pushed himself off his desk and trudged to his mother's office like a man on death row.
"Some idiot robbed a jewelry shop. He was apprehended, but not before he flushed half of the merchandise down the drain." She handed him a map that had been marked with the suspect's location upon his arrest, and a list of the missing items. Ah, she could see it in his eyes, he had a pretty good idea where she was going with this, and he didn't like it one bit."Go find all of it."
"Yes, Chief." He said formally, molding his face into an expressionless mask. She heard him as he was leaving the squad room, "It'll be like a scavenger hunt. A really smelly scavenger hunt." Kid almost always found the good in a bad situation, but it had to be getting hard to do by now, judging by his appearance. She had managed to push him to the point were he was a shadow of his former self, living off coffee and hopes, but he was still holding strong. She had to break him soon because she was starting to run out of ideas.
"Alright," Bumi paced in front of his troops, a tall proud commander preparing his troops for the upcoming mission, "This will require courage and tact, we'll need a set of codewords so we know what to say and when to say it. Now, when I say 'three-day stew' that's you mention how much you love getting along with your mom." He bent down to look Meelo in the eyes, "You got that, Soldier?"
"Yes, Sir." The little boy saluted proudly.
"And when I say 'moonshine on the snow', Mako tells them how great it is to be together as a family. Then, Tenzin, you hit 'em hard with the peace treaty." His eyes closed and his fist clenched, giving off the impression of dramatic, importance, "By the end of dinner, the warring badgermoles will call a ceasefire, and join forces to keep this fine city out of the hands of the criminals who wish to see it destroyed." Crickets. Crickets and one little boy's inspired cheer. Everyone else had been too busy with their own conversations to notice, "Guys?"
"Bumi," the commander's snobby little brother spoke to him, "we are simply going to sit them both down and talk about this."
"You want to go to war without a strategy? Trust me, we need to have a plan."
"It's too late," Asami said from the window, "They're coming now."
"-zin told me to come!" Bolin's was the first voice they heard, and it sounded like he was defending himself.
"I told you to finish polishing the armor!" That was obviously Lin, who was obviously angry that her boy had chose to ignore her orders in favor of the airhead's.
"He said it was important! I'll get on it as soon as they tell me what's wrong, okay?!"
"Kid's," Pema's voice broke the quiet in the room and drowned out the voices outside, "why don't you go eat in your rooms." Normally, every one of them would argue, but none of them wanted to be around to listen to the Beifongs' fight, that and they weren't normally allowed to eat in their rooms. So they hurriedly filled up their plates and headed out just as the front door burst open.
"What's so important that you called Bolin away from work?" Lin skipped the pleasantries and got to the point.
"We need to talk."
"About?"
"This feud between the two of you."
"That is no concern of yours!" Lin's fist clenched at her sides. These people would ruin her chances if she stayed in their presence for too long, "Bolin, get back to your job. We're not wasting time here." Then she stormed out, leaving her son behind with his honorary family. He gave them a sad smile to thank them for the effort, grabbed a piece of fruit and then walked out without a word.
"Wait, Bolin." Tenzin jogged to catch up with his nephew.
"I better get back, Uncle Tenzin."
"Then let me give you a ride back on Oogi."
"Yeah, I guess that'd be alright."
He fell asleep. Not that it had surprised Tenzin, the teenager's eyes were drooping since his body hit the saddle, so by the time they made it to headquarters he was dead to the world. So the uncle put his cloak around his nephew to keep him warm and stood watch above the station's entrance. When Lin came into view he swooped down on his glider.
"Go away, Tenzin." Lin pushed past him and into the building.
"Lin I just want to talk." He followed her.
"Keep your nose outta this." She kept her pace towards her office where a door would be slammed in his face if he didn't think of someway to make her stop.
"Bolin's asleep on the roof." He blurted, and she screeched to a halt. Success.
"What? I'm gonna kill that boy." Or agonizing failure, whichever. Tenzin decided that now was a good time for an intervention. Using his bending to enhance his speed, he got ahead of her to stand between her and the door leading to the roof. Admittedly, a dangerous place to be at the moment, but he wanted Lin to cool down before waking her son up.
"Now Lin, I-" The sound of ripping metal stopped him from finishing his sentence. Lin was out of the freshly created hole in the ceiling and had it closed before he could get through, so he went for the door, just to find it'd been locked. There were many windows in the building, all he had to do was get out of one to get up to the roof, "Lin, don't!"
"Quiet down, Airhead." Lin sat in Oogi's saddle, but hadn't been going to shake Bolin awake as it appeared at first, she was mindlessly stroking his hair with a brokenhearted look on her face.
"Lin." He whispered this time, climbing in the saddle.
"He is tired, isn't he?"
"He has been working very hard lately."
"It's for the best. He shouldn't be stuck this job. All he wants to do is make people happy, that's how he's always been. Being a cop, seeing good people hurting every day, knowing that even if he catches the bastard who hurt them, he can't stop the pain...then realizing no matter what he does, there'll always be evil people hurting innocent people... I can't let him go through that. It'll destroy him one way or the other."
"I know." Tenzin put an arm around her shoulders. He knew Bolin's hopeless optimism and natural empathy would make the police work a less than ideal choice for his career, but there was hope, "There is a way to compromise."
"No." She still persisted, quietly, but no less sternly, "He leaves the force. Period."
"What if he was a Police Liaison to the Metalbending Academy?" Well he had her attention now, if only out of pure and simple curiosity, "A wise guru nam-"
"Get to the point." She was in no mood for the words of some guru that lived three hundred years ago who gabbed nonsense and called it wisdom.
"If you give a man a piece of fruit, you will feed him one time. If you teach him how to plant and harvest, you will feed both him and his family every day."
…
Bolin opened his eyes to a room lit only by street lights below. He instantly recognized it as his mother's office, he instantly realized that she'd put her coat over him, but he had to wake up a bit before he remembered that he was supposed to be polishing armor at that very moment. He hurried to get up, tripping over his own to feet in his haste. Opening the door, he managed to run smack into a metal wall on his way out and he hit the ground with a thud.
"Bolin." His mom rolled her eyes as she offered him a hand up, "Go back to bed, Boy."
"Huh?" Not very articulate, but he was confused. Considering how the woman was acting, he wasn't sure that he was actually awake.
"Get some sleep. We'll talk tomorrow."