Whirlwind [Avatar Aang]

☁Chapter Nine☁

Nazadori wasn't exactly excited to be spending some time with her family on one of her days out of the palace. She didn't want to hear them crack jokes about her new role as queen or to hear how much they didn't think that she could be queen. Most of all, she didn't know how to interact with them now that she was spending less and less time with them. Was she the same person she was before Bumi's death? She wasn't sure. But she didn't want to find out.

Gazon had sent her on a mission while she was home, anyway. She needed to get the real opinions from the public of Omashu while also being inconspicuous. Sure, she had announced to the public that she was going to be queen, but if she was wearing her regular outfit, maybe they wouldn't even recognize her. As long as she stayed out of her own neighborhood where she was very much known, she knew that she could do this and remain inconspicuous. Hopefully.

Nazadori stopped in front of her house, staring at the front door, willing it to stay shut for the time being. She had to prepare herself to go back inside and face her family again, but she wasn't sure if she could do it. She had told Gazon earlier that she would enlist her family's help, yet that was coming back to scare her and haunt her.

Squaring her shoulders, Nazadori pushed open the door before she told herself otherwise. This was what she had to do. She couldn't hide away from it now, not when she was going to be queen. Her life was different now, and she had to do things she never wanted to do in the first place. 

The little mudroom was empty, so Nazadori slipped her boots off and walked deeper into the house. Once she made it into the living room, she realized her siblings were chatting softly in there together, but once she stepped in there with them, their words went very, very quiet. 

"Nazadori!" Mava said, jumping up from her spot on one of the cushions next to the low couch against the far wall. "What are you doing here?"

"I had the day off, and I wanted to come back home and spend some time with you guys."

Mava grinned at her before wrapping her arm around her shoulders and rubbing her knuckles through her hair. Nazadori tried to get out of her grip, but her sister was way too strong for her, especially since she had begun lifting large pieces of earth to get even stronger for her job. Yes, she could earthbend easily, but she wanted to gain more muscles to match up with the other guards of Omashu.

"Hey, don't mess up the future queen's hair," Baleng said from his worn-out spot on the low couch in their living room. That was his spot, and he sat there day after day while he read through scrolls and books or even just napped. Today, he was holding a well-worn book, one that Nazadori had read when she was younger, before she started acting out. "She needs to look presentable to the public, especially when they know about who's going to be queen now."

"About that," Mava said, letting go of Nazadori, "I thought you told us not to tell anyone and that none of the advisors were going to announce it to the public. Why did you end up doing that?"

"I guess we took your words into consideration." Nazadori ran her fingers through her hair, trying to tame the wild pieces that Mava just messed up. She glared up at her sister, who just smiled at her. "Gazon told me that it was better for the people to come to terms with me coming to the throne now rather than later."

"I'm not sure if that's going so well out there," Mava said, using her chin to gesture outside of the house. Nazadori tried not to show her two siblings that she already knew about that and that it was greatly affecting her. "You should hear what the people say to me before they realize that the future queen is my adopted sister."

Nazadori glanced down at her feet. Was Mava going back to the story that Nazadori was adopted and that she wasn't actually her sister? She had done that when Nazadori first started going to the academy, when people would point her out to Mava as she passed by her in the hallways. Nazadori thought her sister had grown out of that, but apparently, she hadn't.