*ponders*

[lizbee]

What should I write?

Good suggestions may result in commentfic. Sensible suggestions like "your Avatar Big Bang, because you've had Azula and Toph stuck in an underground lake for weeks and they're starting to get cranky" will be met with eyedarts.

Comments

[biichan]

Azula, Toph, and their Sokka Baster Baby!

Inheritance

[lizbee]

Azula is secretly relieved that her daughter resembles Toph. She's grown to like Sokka despite his considerable inadequacies, but sometimes she looks at her daughter and pictures her with darker skin and blue eyes, and wonders if she could have loved a child that looked like Katara.

Instead, Diao has pale skin and green eyes, and a solemn, narrow face that reminds Azula of Toph's mother. Azula decides to count herself lucky, even after she returns to her rooms in the palace and finds her daughter sprawled on the carpet, contentedly pulling apart one of Zuko's new electrical lamps and pointing out to the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation all the interesting ways one could combine firebending and metalbending to make it more powerful.

The prince is banished back to his tutor, and Azula says, "What am I to do with you?"

"You could send me to the workshops," says Diao diffidently, "so I can see the lamps being made properly."

Azula doesn't bother to dignify that with a response.

"Clean up this mess," she says, nudging a piece of lamp with her foot. "Tonight, before dinner, you can stand up and apologise to the Fire Lord for destroying his property."

Diao shrinks, not so much at the apology as at the prospect of making it in public. Azula feels a twinge of sympathy, quickly repressed. Her mother once gave her a similar punishment after she set fire to Azulon's garden. Azula had managed to craft an apology that made it sound like Lu Ten and Zuko's faults, and her father had laughed, and the rest of the night was full of the stiff, unhappy silence between her parents.

It's not that she's especially good as a parent, Azula thinks. Diao is simply too straightforward to bother with lies. Which is one of the many things Azula doesn't quite understand about her, along with the way she hears the earth and cannot look at a machine without wanting to pull it to pieces.

(Azula can taste lightning and see all the weak points in people and governments that will make them fall apart, and her imagination fills in the rest, but the fact remains that there are languages that Diao speaks that she will never learn.)

They visit Toph's mother every spring. Poppy watches her granddaughter help sweep Toph's father's tomb and says, "It's lucky that she doesn't take after her father."

Toph tenses, but Azula just says, "Not yet, but maybe she'll grow into it," and later she makes arrangements to take her daughter to see the workshops and factories of the city.

Re: Inheritance

[biichan]

This is beautiful. Thank you for writing it for me :)