Chapter Text
Kyoshi and Rangi's marriage and their lives together could only be described as perfect.
These days Kyoshi found herself in possession of a life she would have never imagined for herself. One with a loving wife with whom she shared a nice home, a close group of friends, the respect of a community and the opportunity to do real good in the world. Of course there were still challenges, but none she felt that she couldn't handle.
Things were good, all things considered they were peaceful as well, and naturally as the years went by that naturally brought another thing into the picture; children. More specifically when she and her wife might choose to have children.
They had discussed it extensively, perhaps too extensively honestly. It had been more than five years of marriage before they even brought it up and almost three years now that they had been intermittently discussing their plans around having children.
At first they didn't know if they wanted any. Neither exactly lived a lifestyle conducive to having children, and especially for the Avatar having children was hard.
Her job description meant facing some amount of danger every single day. She had plenty of enemies, many of which would not have been above exploiting anyone she cared about to use against her. A child was another risk, something else she didn't know if she could protect and couldn't imagine what it might be like to lose.
For awhile it had seemed like it might just never happen, but overtime things, well, they changed for lack of a better way to phrase it.
The village children stopped seeming rude and annoying to her and started looking quite adorable, even when they got into mischief, perhaps especially then. She could tell her wife was thinking the same thing, and she teased her often about getting soft on her students. The other woman would always openly deny it, but she knew what she saw.
The final straw had come when they had ended up, through a small comedy of errors, responsible for looking after a baby for a few days. Although the child had relatives, so there was no need to adopt her themselves, she couldn't get the picture of her wife with a baby out of her head. A feeling that from her observations, and their subsequent discussions on the topic, seemed to be mutual.
They talked over each and every detail, from how many children they might want to how they might want to go about having them. Though they both agreed that they would be interested in adopting children should the situation ever arise, there was something appealing about having a child that was a mix of the two of them. If they could find an avenue to do so, they would both be interested in trying.
She had heard whispers, about spirits and their ability to grant people children when biology and other natural measures failed. After a bit of digging and some more discussion, she and her wife eventually settled on both a method and a spirit to work with. One they had both spoken to themselves and spoken to another couple it had helped to verify its legitimacy.
That left her where she was now, returning from a brief journey to the spirit world she had undertaken with the aforementioned less than conventional goal in mind. Spirits could do a lot of things, they weren't as constrained by natural or biological 'rules' as humans were.
She had gone to confirm the final terms of the arrangement, and since she had an easier time entering the spirit world than her wife did she had gone alone.
Speaking of her wife, there was absolutely no one she wanted to see more, both in general and at this specific moment. Situating herself back in reality she stood up and all but ran off to their bedroom, where she knew the other was waiting for her.
Immediately she realized that it was a very very good thing she had decided to ask the spirit to wait until later for the first transformation. If she hadn't and she had come in on her wife as she was now, with her hair down stretched out across their bed lying in wait for her, there was absolutely no chance they would have had a conversation first. Even now, she found herself struggling against her instincts to remain calm and go about changing so she could join her wife on the bed. It was a struggle the other woman did not appear to miss if the slight smirk on her lips was anything to go by.
"It had a few terms." She said, shuffling closer so they could cuddle up beside one another, her head resting against her wife's chest. A position she had chosen for completely chaste reasons, of course, the proximity was incidental.
"Naturally." Rangi replied as she leaned back against the pillows, looking down at her with only some what concealed anticipation glowing in her eyes.
"The uh… transformation will only last a few days, it's not permanent, it said three days was average but maybe a week or so at most." She began, trying not to feel so embarrassed about the whole thing. "And it will only apply to one of us at a time, and only once each month." She tried to recount exactly what she had been told
"Will we get any warning before it happens?"
"No. But it said it would only happen at night, so it shouldn't interrupt anything." She said and her wife nodded.
"It also said that it may take awhile, given how the transformation can disrupt cycles, and sometimes it takes awhile for the… seed… to become uh, potent." She swore she hadn't planned to be this awkward about it, but she found herself flushing and fumbling over her words anyways. "So we shouldn't expect anything right away, but when it does happen we'll know because a month will pass and the transformation won't happen again." She cleared her throat before explaining the rest, doing a better job at keeping composed this time.
"Well then, I guess we'll just have to work verryyyy hard at it till we succeed." Rangi nearly purred with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, and Kyoshi could only imagine the planning of that hard work running behind them.
Though she did want a child, that was technically the whole reason they were doing this after all, a large part of her hoped that it would take awhile if for no other reason than to give them the opportunity to practice the virtue of working long and hard at something.