This choice: At the Bei Fong estate, in Gaoling... (canon) • Go Back...Chapter #4At the Bei Fong estate, in Gaoling... (canon) by: EvilFuzzy9   Lao Bei Fong had not been having a very good day.
Well, to be more accurate, he had not been having a very good week, either. In fact, if he was to be entirely honest with himself, the whole last month had really just been nothing but one headache after another.
It had all started with the news of the defeat of the Fire Lord (or was it the Phoenix King?) at the hands of the Avatar, and the report of the newly crowned Fire Lord Zuko's call for the immediate withdrawal of all nonessential Fire Nation military personnel from the Earth Kingdom.
Now, ostensibly, this was a good thing for the Earth Kingdom and its citizens - the war was over! the war was over! - people like Lao Bei Fong and his wife, Poppy. And it was, for the most part. At the very least, Lao was certainly grateful that he no longer had to fear his estate being stormed and his assets seized by Fire Nation troops. No, now he just had to worry about being audited by the Earth King and strung up by the gibbet for the crime of treason.
So, yes, I suppose you could say that old Lao was in something of a pickle.
You see, the Bei Fongs had for generations been one of the wealthiest families in the world. They were a very old, very prestigious family that had for centuries profited heavily from international trade. They had strong ties to wealthy merchant and noble families throughout the world, ties of business and marriage dating back to several centuries before the Hundred Year War. For nearly a thousand years, the Bei Fong family had enjoyed its reputation as one of the wealthiest, most influential families in the world. For twenty-four generations, the heads of the Bei Fong family had benefited from partnership and trade between the Four Nations - Lao's own great-great-great-grandfather had dined with both the Earth King and Fire Lord, and negotiated the safe passage of Bei Fong merchant ships between the Northern and Southern Water Tribes after a dispute between the two Chiefs.
The Winged Boar had endured through countless challenges and hardships, and always they had come out on the top of the heap. Through generations of ruthless political maneuvering and countless marriages of convenience (Lao's own wife had been the eldest daughter of a wealthy, young family of Yu Dao industrialists), the Bei Fong family had managed to thrive and prosper for centuries.
But then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.
The genocide of the Air Nomads - the Rape of the Four Temples, as Lao had heard it called in a rambling poem by some unknown author - shocked the world, and the Fire Nation's subsequent assaults on the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes made it basically everyone's enemy. And for many years, the Bei Fong family - which had prior to the war profited extensively from a number interests in the Fire Nation's booming economy - fell into relative obscurity.
For, you see, Mao Bei Fong, Lao's grandfather and the head of the family during the reign of Sozin, had been a very patriotic soul. The moment he learned of the war, he severed all of their family's extensive ties with the Fire Nation (no small feat, since more than a few daughters of wealthy Fire Nation families had married into the Bei Fongs over the generations), and invested the vast majority of the family's liquid assets into local Earth Kingdom businesses. Unfortunately, as patriotic as Mao was, he did not have the most economic sense, and several of his most important investments failed catastrophically, leaving the Bei Fong family in rather dire straits, financially.
Fortunately, Lao's father, Long Bei Fong, had been a more practical sort. When Long took over the family business, the first thing he did was salvage their connections in the Fire Nation, secretly investing most of the Bei Fong family's remaining capital in various promising Fire Nation industries. Long's gamble paid off considerably better than his father's had, and by the time he retired to let his son take over the reins, the Bei Fong family had regained most of its former wealth.
Lao, in turn, had followed shrewdly in his father's tracks, secretly continuing business with Fire Nation merchants and industrialists, with the continued prosperity of the Winged Boar to show for it. Everything had been going swimmingly, really. Aside from his daughter's blindness (an unfortunate condition that tended to pop up every few generations in the Bei Fong line) and his continued failure to produce a suitable heir - and goodness knows how hard he had tried - things had been going well enough for the Bei Fong family.
At least, right until the day the Avatar chose to grace their home with his presence, demand his daughter as an earthbending teacher, and - when Lao quite reasonably said no - abduct said daughter and spirit her away to who knows where. And now the war was over, the dust was clearing, his daughter was suddenly a great war hero and NOT a helpless kidnapping victim, and the Earth King's tax collectors were beginning to ask Lao about his supposed "off-shore accounts" and more suspicious investments.
Lao glanced around somewhat nervously at the decor of the restored Bei Fong manor. Never before had he noticed quite how... Fire Nation... it looked. All dragons and volcanoes and wooden furnishings, with not so much as a single badger mole in sight.
Even if this was the way the Bei Fong manor had been decorated for generations, Lao still knew that auditors might find it suspicious when added up with other small incongruencies, and suspicious auditors digging through his financial records was the last thing he wanted.
Lao sighed. He knew that there was one way he might be able to salvage things without spending thousands of gold pieces on bribing high ranking officials, and his wife Poppy knew it, too. The time was come for their daughter to do her duty to the family. The two of them had decided as much the previous night.
An arranged marriage would be for the best.
But the question was, who? Lao knew that the most effective way to quash any rumors of treasonous past dealings would be to engage his daughter, Toph Bei Fong, to someone in high standing with the Earth King, at the very least. It would also be very helpful if this person were a war hero or commander of some sort, a man who had fought against the Fire Nation and been recognized for his service.
Ideally, the chosen suitor should be young, promising, someone who represented the future of the Earth Kingdom, and of the world as a whole. Somebody handsome, charming, charismatic - a darling of the masses and a friend to the nobility. Someone with plenty of business sense, and either a strong enough will to rein in their wild child of a daughter, or else enough patience to endure her antics.
Lao shook his head.
"Ah, but where could I ever hope to find such a person?" he opined, shaking his head once more before looking down to go through the mail.
And that's when he saw it. That blasted messenger hawk.
He scowled, thinking bitterly of the letter his daughter had wrote her. And by association, his mind went also to young Toph's traveling companions, and Lao recalled some interesting rumors he had recently overheard some of his servants sharing during one of their breaks, wild accounts of a certain Water Tribe boy's exploits in the war - a young man who just so happened to be one of his daughter's traveling companions, and one of whom his daughter was most certainly fond, if Lao still knew anything about a young maiden's heart.
And the head of the Bei Fong family smiled craftily, the seeds of a plan already beginning to take root in his mind.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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