Ficbit

[weirdlet]

Just chewing over my own Ursa head-canon- this struck me while I was driving and fortunately stuck around long enough for me to get to a keyboard. I love fine-lady Ursa, but I also like blending it with tough-as-fucking-nails-and-doesn't-think-that's-weird-at-all soldier-girl Ursa- I used to think of her as just a swords-woman, but I find myself closer and closer to outright stealing Becky2112's twin-dao-and-blue-flame gig.

This in particular is all about how she can love Ozai and still be good-mom-without-being-naive in my head.

He has beautiful hands, and she wants him to put them on her bloody- to leave red handprints smeared across her skin like some ancient Sun Warrior ritual paint. Ozai brings forth things in her that make her wonder where her civilization has gone.

His pretensions of civilization are important to him, precisely because they are pretensions, and ones he has been trying to live up to under Azulon’s stern gaze all his life. But under the fine hair and devotion to civil manners, Ozai is a beast, and she revels in him- she has looked him in the eye and slapped his nose when he proves rough when she doesn’t want rough, and thus they walk in accord, in strength and sync and such passion.

Every woman deserves a beast, sometimes. He is hers.

But sometimes- the beast just can’t understand some things. When a soldier and a beast have a child that is, for the moment, merely human- what then? When he cannot understand the pangs of a mother’s heart for soft, sweet young that know naught of claws and viciousness yet, and that that time of childhood and growth and brief innocence is worthy and good, just as much as clever cruelties and the crazed will to cling to survival?

It saddens her, to know he lacks that. So she loves her children and tries to get him to show what affection he can, but somehow the mix is never right. They’re either too vulnerable and thus make him uncomfortable with how easily they might be hurt, or a threat that must be neutralized. Sometimes both, when they overwhelm her and seem to threaten to take her away from him.

She lives in separate spheres, and tries to keep them steady when they overlap. It works, for the most part. He prizes the child that fits most closely with what he believes is worthy, and pushes the other to get with it, or be left behind. She tries to explain to him that it doesn’t work that way, and again, he doesn’t understand- that was how it worked for him, why should it be any different for them?

Ursa loves them all, but is very tired of talking to walls.

Comments

[spyridona.livejournal.com]

I do like this take on Ozai and his kids; notably about not knowing how to deal with them and seeing them as threats. It fits with the show very well.

And how you write! It's so thick. I love it, it's very Russian. ^^

Me? I go with the tough as nails Ursa. However I don't have her all soldiery. Her mother wouldn't dare allow her heir to go off and get herself killed over metal. (Roku's family and those married to Roku's family know very damn well what the Fire Nation seeks in this war.) Ursa is just a merchant's daughter, but that makes her no less rough.

And I'm caught from stealing beckyh2112 the blue fire thing, but I like the idea she's not much of a bender.

[weirdlet.livejournal.com]

*nod* It's one of those things I go back and forth on. I was originally thinking it was kind of cool to have her a badass normal- and then she started getting all nails-y and discipline-y under the thick love and I was thinking yeeeeeeah, some of Azula's traits have got to come from her, if only with a twist in the process. It can't be all Ozai's fault.

Maybe the blue fire is something that she only does in the verymost towering of rages or exertion- Azula does it all the time because she's just that good and just that arrogant- she has no lower-setting, just all or nothing.

It's so thick. I love it, it's very Russian. ^^

^^ Oddly enough, part of this was in my head along with the vision of the two of them (against all we know about the Fire Nation) snowed in at a hunting lodge, with plush bear-skins about the place.