"Nah, he doesn't, why?"

"I dunno, we've been dating for a while, my parents know."

"Well, mine doesn't."

"Is he going to continue to not till you come up in an interview or some amateur photographer takes a picture of us or something? Like, if you have reasons to keep it quiet, that's okay, but my life is not set up to make that indefinitely possible."

"...Oh." Pause. "That's... unusual."

"I guess." He shrugs. "Dad just doesn't care about much."

"That sounds hard." Beila leans her head on his shoulder.

"I'm used to it," he says, snuggling her a little. "No big deal to me. It'd be weird if he started paying attention."

"If you say so. I'm used to my parents wanting to interact way more than I do. I love them but they're not that interesting."

Dao snorts.

"Like, Chali and Ranyi are both really sweet, and they probably are actually reasonably interesting when they're at work - I took introductory airbending lessons with Ranyi, she's a good teacher even if she's not qualified enough in airbending to handle higher levels - but when they get home they just argue about whether it's fair for airbending to still be excluded from league-level probending, or talk about how the neighbor's sparrowkeet got loose and if you see it please tell her, etcetera. Fine in small doses, nice to come home to, not how I want to spend all my time."

"Why do you call them by name all the time?" he wonders.

"I don't always, I address them to their faces as Mom and Dad, now and then I'll do it other times too. It just seems natural to me to default to using their names. Those are their names, I'm the only person in the world who'd be expected to call them anything different outside a professional context. Like, Chali wouldn't ask you to call him Chief Guxiao, even, not unless you got arrested."

"Okay, that makes sense."

"I'd probably call them Mom and Dad all the time if they called me Daughter all the time," Beila laughs.

He giggles.

"I think you're actually the first person to ask about that habit of mine, and now I'm wondering if half the people at school quietly think I'm adopted and keeping my guardians at arm's length or something. Which isn't it at all. It'd be weird and distancing if they called me Daughter and not my name. I don't see why it'd be different the other way around."

"Well... it's different the other way around because people expect you to call your parents Mom and Dad but they don't expect your parents to call you Daughter. So if you're not calling them Mom and Dad, people will feel like there must be some reason you don't do that, and if they don't ask you, the easiest thing to assume is that you're not calling them that because you don't want to call them that - because you don't want to relate them to you that way."

"Sure, I'm not conforming to the expectation, I get that. I just think the expectation is weird. Ancestor relationships are the only thing we do that to. No one expects me to call you Boyfriend or my friends Friend or if I had a sibling to call them Sister or Brother, but a parent or grandparent gets titled, all the time."

"Maybe it's because ancestor relationships are more important," he suggests. "Theoretically."

"If I had a sibling I think I could easily be more close to him or her than to my parents," says Beila. "Maybe that's not supposed to be true, for some reason."

"Well, and you might have a lot of sisters or brothers, but you usually only have one mom, two grandmas, and so on."

"Me and Ranyi are technically descended from Avatar Aang, and this is important because he's famous and the reason there are still any airbenders, and stuff, and there's only one of him, but we don't count the intervening generations and call him some-number-of-greats-Grandfather, we just call him Aang," Beila points out.

"...well, yeah," says Dao. "There's only one Avatar Aang. You probably have a lot of dead great-great-great-and-so-on-grandfathers. But there are a whole bunch of people named Ranyi, probably, and only one of them is your mom. See what I mean?"