Chapter Text
The east wing of the Sato estate had been an untouched shrine to Asami's mother since the day she died. Once or twice as a child, Asami had tottered into the rooms during dark nights, searching for the last traces of her mother's warmth, but she was always quickly found and chided by her father.
"It's best to avoid it, Asami," he'd said. "Throwing yourself into your studies is the only way to heal."
So she had listened and read and built, heeding her father's advice even years after his imprisonment.
But now that Mako and Bolin's family had moved in, and their cousin was expecting another baby, she couldn't avoid it anymore. The space was needed.
And in the end that's all it really was—a space, a set of rooms meant to be cleaned out and repurposed ages ago.
So one summer midday, after a glass of aged fire whiskey from her father's stash, Asami went up to the east wing with three big boxes neatly labeled keep, donate, and trash.
Now that she'd set herself to the task, there was more trash than she might have imagined—tubes of mascara and lipstick with only powdery traces of pigment left in them, short to-do lists scrawled on paper napkins, empty shoe and garment boxes from the legacy department stores. Each mundane item she dumped in the box was further proof that her mother had been real once, a person rather than a memory.
As she sorted through the items, Asami tried to focus on the task at hand. There was no need to reopen a wound that had scarred over so gracefully, not with Korra still healing in the South Pole and Bolin away at war. With the world—her world—ready to unravel at any moment, the least she could do was keep herself composed. So she didn’t open the family albums. She put the framed photos face-down in the keep box and didn’t flip through the books on the nightstand—mostly economics texts and old Fire Nation poetry—looking for proof of her substantiveness in the neat annotations.
She had almost made it through the entire endeavor unscathed when the picture fell out of a first edition copy of Princess Azula’s Treatise on Advanced Firebending. Why her mother, a nonbender, would even own such a text made no sense whatsoever to Asami. But what she saw in the photograph itself made her breath seize in her lungs.
In the photo were twelve young adults dressed to the nines—couples with arms around each other, friends in matching strands of pearls—all standing in front of a double dragon flag. She could pick out her mother in the crowd, still looking like a teenager as she posed between two other girls.
Asami searched for any sign of fear or discomfort on her mother’s face, but all she could detect was the giddiness that came with underage drinking and a night out with friends.
She looked away from the picture and then back at it, once, twice, expecting the image to change. But there in the background, ever present, was the double dragon flag—the symbol of the Agni Kais, the gang that had murdered her mother.
Asami stared at the image for another minute, two, silently demanding answers from the frozen figures cloaked in joy. Eventually, she tucked the picture into her jacket pocket, and called Chow and Chow Jr. in to move the furniture.
It had taken five whole days with the picture sitting on her nightstand for Asami to finally bring it to the foremost expert on Republic City’s triads.
“If you’re looking for Mako, Prince Wu’s already dragged him to the spa,” Chief Beifong said, glancing up from her stack of paperwork to greet Asami with a nod.
“Actually, I’m here to see you.”
The chief raised a neatly plucked eyebrow. “Do you have a crime to report?”
“No—I don’t think so, anyway.”
The chief sighed. “Kid, I really don’t have all day, so—”
“I think my mother might have been an Agni Kai,” she said, giving voice to the thought for the first time. She fished the photo out of her purse and slid it across the desk. “I found this picture when I was cleaning out my mother’s rooms and I…I don’t know what to think, really. I was hoping you could help me.”
The chief looked at the picture and sighed, running a hand down the length of her face. “I was on the Agni Kai beat when I started on the force, and to my knowledge, your mother was never really one of them.”
Asami released a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “But?”
“But your aunt was affiliated.”
“My aunt?”
“Yui,” the chief pointed to one of the women in the photo—tall and queenly with short finger waves and a playful smirk. “Your mom’s older sister. She owned a hair salon downtown.”
“Owned? As in past tense?”
“She died about a year before your mother did.”
She remembered it vaguely—her mother dressed in white, mascara turning her tears into ink as she got into a satomobile by herself early one morning. When she got back, her parents had argued long and loud into the night, though Asami never knew what about.
“Was it—"
“An assassin,” Lin said. “Our department determined that the main target was most likely her husband Ren.” She paused to point at the young man with an arm wrapped around her aunt’s waist. “He was a captain in the triad.”
Asami nodded, glancing down at the table. “But what if he wasn’t the target? What if the same people who killed my aunt came after my mother? Maybe it wasn’t just a robbery.”
“Some of my best detectives had the same thought years ago, but your father didn’t want our people digging into her past. He put pressure on the council and we ended up having to drop the case.”
Asami exhaled deeply through her nose, a familiar frustration rising within her, but she quickly let it go, determined to get as much information as possible. “Who else is in the picture?"
“Besides your mom, aunt, and uncle? There’s Fire Dagger Fumiko, Red Hands Ryuji, Arson Queen Aiko, and Lightning Bolt Zolt. I don’t know the rest of them, but they probably weren’t as high up on the food chain as the ones I named.”
“Are they all still alive?” Asami asked.
“Fumiko and Ryuji both died in the Agni Kais’ civil wars. Aiko won that war, but we were able to put her away five years ago. Zolt went on to found the Triple Threat Triad and ran it up until Amon took his bending.”
“And if I wanted to speak to them—”
“I’d advise against it,” Lin said. “These aren’t good people, Asami.”
“I don’t need them to be,” Asami said, her gaze turning back to the photograph. “They just need to know what happened.”