Hey Boomi. I was wondering, how do you think Baatar and mommy Suki's relationship would have been? And Suki + her grandbabies?
Thank you so much for the ask, LM! And what a great ask, too! 😄 I loved answering this one…even though it got kinda long and ramble-y.
In my Ultimate Sukka Family Headcanon, which is something I don’t write fics for really (it’s much easier to write just 3-4 OC kids with distinct personalities rather than twice that number), they get married pretty young—like 19ish, right where the comics left off. They just both know they’re it for each other, so what’s the point in waiting? 🥰 But regardless, Sukka goes back to Kyoshi Island not planning on having kids anytime soon—they’re just trying to enjoy being kids themselves and have fun, since the war pretty much stripped them of a normal childhood.
But that’s not quite how things work out, and Sokka and Suki quickly realize that being both spontaneous and frisky is precisely how you end up pregnant. 😬They freak out and panic at first, of course, but then with each passing symptom, the terrifying abstract concept of having a baby starts to feel more like welcoming family member #3, and by the time little Kanna arrives, they’re so hyped to be parents that they make Foaming Mouth Guy look like a stick-in-the-mud. 🤪
Fast forward several years later (almost a decade, maybe?), and they’ve basically created an entire troupe of Kyoshi Warriors—six girls. 👩🏼🦰👩🏽👩🏼🦰👩🏽👩🏼🦰👩🏽Six sassy, sarcastic, carnivorous, little girls (with varying senses of humor) who will just as soon chi-block the shit out of a playground bully as write and recite haikus. They’re a handful, and Sokka and Suki love them. Attempts to pump the baby breaks fail once again (they weren’t really trying that hard anyway) 😏 and Suki finds out she’s pregnant with #7. Everyone predicts a girl, because at this point, who wouldn’t? 🧐 Sokka has stopped joking about the spirit of Avatar Kyoshi cursing him to be forever sonless as punishment for his past sexism because…he just truly doesn’t care about that anymore. He loves his daughters, they love him, and that’s all that matters. 😌
Enter Baatar. 👶🏻 Naturally, the whole Gaang and all Sukka’s family and friends go bananas when they finally have a boy, and everyone (especially the SWT folks) makes a point to congratulate Sokka on having a son. And he’s definitely excited, of course—but it’s Suki who takes one look at her baby boy and just suddenly feels a type of love she never knew before. 😯 She understands now why Sokka is so crazy about their girls—because they remind him of her, and little Baatar looks so much like her husband, her soulmate, that she doesn’t want to ever take her eyes off of him. ☺️
Baatar is the baby of the family, so between his dad and older sisters, he already gets a whole lotta love—but from Suki, it’s different. It’s not in her nature to actually coddle her children, but with Baatar, she comes pretty close—much closer she did with than any of her daughters. She reads to him every day, always helps him lace up his little boots, snuggles with him all through stormy nights, tells him legends and tall tales from Kyoshi Island & the SWT, and even some G-rated versions of her and Sokka’s adventures. But ‘the memory’—the thing they do together that is just between mother and son, that’s so sacred not even Sokka and the girls get to join—is when they go down to the bay at dawn to watch the koi fish jump out of the water and build sandcastles together. 🌅🏰That’s where Baatar begins to love building things—beautiful things. His earliest memory is watching the sky fill with color, sitting next to his mom on the beach and helping her (or so he thinks as a three-year-old) shape the sand into something new and magnificent. 😮
It sticks with Baatar forever, and they go down to the beach, sometimes as a whole family, sometimes just the two of them, pretty regularly until Baatar is a teenager. By then, thanks to his mom, he knows he wants to be an architect…and when it becomes obvious that he needs a real Earthbending teacher—like his aunt in Republic City, whose cute daughter might also have something to do with it 🤨—Suki’s heart breaks. 😞 Their daughters are still on Kyoshi Island or in the SWT, but it still hurts more than anything when she has to stand on the dock and hold back tears while she hugs her baby boy goodbye 😣…because she knows that if she starts crying, Baatar will break down too and want to stay. And as much as she loves him, he belongs out there in the world where he can chase after his dreams and put all his passion and talent to good use. 😔
They exchange letters steadily, but Suki still carries around a dull ache knowing that Toph and Suyin are spending more time with Baatar than she is. There’s a new ceiling to her happiness that’s never been there before, and Sokka takes it upon himself to cheer her up. 🤪 One night when they sneak out of their cottage and camp out on the bluffs, he does such a good job of cheering her up that…well… 😛⛺️😩…I hope you get the picture.
Enter Senna and Varrick (who I’ve started hc’ing as twins, because why not?) 😄 Now preggers at forty years old, Suki remembers that there’s still so much happiness right in front of her (plus two bundles of it right inside her), and her whole family is relieved to see that their matriarch is herself again. 😌 And to top it off? Sokka gets bullied by Aang into going into politics, and after the twins are born, they move to Republic City. It’s hard saying goodbye to most of their daughters (the youngest few come with them), but the eldest are practically young women now, and it feels natural at this point, no matter how much it stings when Sokka bawls like a baby and leaves them each with a hand-painted family portrait, a heartfelt haiku, and a huge barrel of seal jerky. 😖😖😖
In the city, Suki gets to see Baatar become a man while still getting to be a mom to Senna and Varrick (whose birth name is Iknik, he just gives himself a bunch of extra names after making it big). It’s the best of both worlds, and she gets some closure when she eventually joins Baatar and Baatar Jr. down at the beach years later, helping her grandson make his first sandcastle just like she helped his father. (And after Baatar and Varrick join the Earth Empire years later and ultimately come to regret it, Suki takes them both by the ear and reminds them that the namesake of their home island ate Earth Kingdom tyrants for breakfast, possibly the most ironically humiliating part of that whole fiasco for the two boys. 😡😵)
As for the grandbabies? Kanna (oldest child) and her sisters take one look at their parents’ nine children and go, “Ha, amateurs.” Family reunions are absolute madness, because between Sokka, Varrick, Baatar/Suyin and their kids, then the Avatar herself and dozens of little Kyoshi Island munchkins, Suki has a ton of big personalities to deal with. 😜 When she and Sokka finally retire and move back to Kyoshi Island for good, Gran-Gran Suki makes a point to take her children’s children down to the beach to play in the sand and watch the sun color the sky as many mornings as she can. For someone to which community is so important, it’s the perfect way to spend her life. 🥰 (And it’s hardly unexpected, but with so many grandkids running around the world, she gets to meet quite a few itty-bitty babies named after her and her husband—and her favorite miniature Suki is definitely Opal’s daughter.)
How did your simple ask turn into Suki’s bittersweet biography? 😟 I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t help myself. I love Sukka, and I love fluffy family headcanons! And if you can’t tell…once I get going it’s hard for me to stop…and I ended up really getting deep into both Sukka feels and emotional feels. I need to go give my mom a hug. 🥺
@light-miracles thank you so much for the ask! It was a pleasure answering it!
