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attackfishWritten for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
atlaland bingo, in which I won the Fire Nation 300 points. We won, but sadly, this is my last round, at least for a while.
Safe Inside
Toph kept her hands in front of her. The floor creaked and chirped, and there were so many vibrations, if she could just read them. "You know what, I think I'll sleep outside."
"It's the middle of winter. The snow's higher than you are." Suki's voice wasn't that far away. Toph wanted to reach out for it so badly.
"Oh that's nothing. At the South Pole-"
"Sokka!"
Toph made her way over to him, doing her best to ape her normal swagger. And when she walked into him, she poked him hard. "Yeah, Sokka, shut up."
"Hey," I'm just sayin', it could be worse," he said. She could almost hear him throw his hands into the air. She could picture the right vibrations in her mind. "We could be at the South Pole, and you'd have to wear boots, or your feet would fall off."
She put her hand on the wall and followed it to the hearth. "Yeah yeah yeah," she rolled her eyes. "I could be somewhere where there's no earth at all. The horror."
"Just sayin'."
When she stood on the hearth, it felt like she was floating on nothing, like the only thing left in the world was her little stone raft, and all around them was emptiness. It was like being back in the airship, alone. She knew that Sokka was there, and Suki, puffily and grumpily pregnant, and all around her was wooden floor, solid and invisible, but she just couldn't feel it.
Suki waddled over and sat next to her on the hearth. A smaller heart beat underneath Suki's. Toph managed not to lean in. Flopping down beside them, Sokka put his arm around both their shoulders. "Thanks, guys," she mumbled.
"What're you talking about? I just wanted to get warm," Sokka lied.
Fingertips
"So what's this scar everybody keeps talking about?"
Zuko stopped and let his arms fall. "What?"
Toph swung her legs and the base of the fountain jolted with each impact. "Well I can't see it, can I?"
"Aren't you supposed to be teaching the Avatar?" he growled, turning to face her and stretching out his wrists.
"Oh please. I've got him kicking rocks around one of the courtyards." She hopped down and sauntered over. "It'll keep him busy for hours."
Or until he got bored, Zuko thought. "Aren't you being smart."
"Yeah, it's a gift," she snickered. "Anyway, what is it with the scar?"
He bent over to stretch out his back. "Can't you mind your own business?"
She folded her arms. "Hey, you owe me. You burned my feet."
"I said I was sorry!" And he'd been carrying her everywhere for days. She wouldn't leave him alone.
"Sorry doesn't make my feet better," she shot back cheerfully.
"Okay, I have a scar on my face!" he snapped.
"Must be a big one." She grinned widely and elbowed him in the ribs. "The Duke calls you the guy with the scar. How'd you get it?"
"It's none of your business," yelped Zuko, backing up quickly.
She followed. "Can I touch it?" She didn't wait for him to answer. She put the stubby tips of her fingers against it, gently. He stood there, taut and frozen. People didn't touch his scar, except Mai sometimes, who touched it like it wasn't there. But then most people could see it. Most people didn't have to feel it to know it was there. "It is big. What happened?"
"It's a burn scar alright?" he pulled back, against the temple wall.
"Touchy," she said, put she put her hand on his arm, not his face.
Liar's Game
"So if I put the lily here..."
"Ooh, clever," Iroh cooed.
Toph slid her tile forward.
"Oh look, silly me, now I can destroy nearly all of your patterns with my chrysanthemum."
Toph blinked her eyes and made them wide. "Really? I'm pretty sure that's a lily. It goes so well with my lily."
He looked down. "Strange how I ended up with two lily tiles."
"Spooky."
"And two orange-pear blossoms."
Toph whistled, lying back and putting her feet up on the board. Iroh knocked them off.
"And three peonies." He leaned his elbow on the board, and she felt his smothered laughter.
"You sure you didn't get somebody else's set mixed in with yours?" she asked innocently.
"That must be it." They sat on cushions on a wooden floor with a stone game board and stone tiles, and half his advice was genius, and the other half were careful traps, and she had no way to tell which were which. No matter how much she insisted a stone floor would be more fun... He took his elbow off the game board and smiled. She could hear it in his voice. "You might want to move your orange-pear blossom tile near the peony on the left side of the board."
She moved the tile with trepidation.
"Hah!" he crowed, sliding the peony three spaces to the right, and sat back on the cushion. "It does not matter what you change it to. You cannot make any patterns."
"Oh, so now you're going to gloat about beating a poor little blind girl?" She glared.
He leaned forward and put his hand on her arm. "If that poor little blind girl is you..."
"I could sink your tile into the board," she told him smugly.
"What would be the fun in that?"
A Cup of Tea
She held the tray with her head bowed when the guards opened the door. Azulon looked up from the table and waved her in. She kept her head down and glanced up at him discreetly. This, this was why he had picked her for his second son, a sweet little country girl from an impoverished, disgraced family. This accommodating nature of hers, that would have made her a terrible Firelady but made her the perfect wife of a second prince, the way she never treated anything as her due. He favored her with a propitiatory smile.
She poured tea from the pot she had brought into him and handed him one of the cups before lifting her own and taking a sip.
The leaves must have had some mold in them. The tea had a funny taste, so he drained the cup quickly.
She ducked her head and her lips curved up, and his lips curved up in answer. "Was there something you wanted to speak to me about, Ursa?"
"Drinking tea with the woman whose son you've just ordered to be executed isn't smart." Ursa raised the cup to her lips again. "You might be slipping."
The hair on his arms rose. "Ozai told you?"
She nodded.
He wondered if the dizziness he felt was all in his head or if it were real, the effects of poison seeping into his blood and brain. "But you drank too."
"I didn't poison the tea. I poisoned the cup."
He tried to stand up, but his legs wouldn't hold him. As he slumped to the floor, Azulon opened his mouth to shout.
Ursa bent over him. "Shh, don't scream. You're already dead."
~*~
She nodded to both guards on her way out. "He's gone to sleep," she said with a slight smile.
Watersblood
The water rose up to his neck. There was no moon in the Spirit World sky, no true day, no true night, but if he closed his eyes, he could almost feel the moonlight glinting off the water all around him. He could almost see her face in the glow.
His feet left the bottom of the lake, and lifted up as he tilted back, to float in the imagined moonlight, spreading his arms.
"Are you going to come out?" she asked, folding her legs to sit above the water, the light pouring off her leaking through the part between his eyelids. Whenever that light ghosted by him, there was a sick, sudden jolt. Yue. It was Yue giving him an understanding smile, not Tui giving him a mocking one.
"No."
"Don't sulk," she admonished, pushing her hair back from her face.
"Or what?" he asked cooly. There were moments, flashes, where he just wanted to push her, push her and push her and push her hard enough and far enough, to see if he could get her to start pulling. She just poured sympathy down on him like acid. "I can do whatever I want."
She smiled and patted his head until he opened his eyes and looked at her. "Well, if you enjoy sulking, I'll leave you alone."
She stood up, and where she walked on the surface of the lake, traces of moonlight lingered until she faded from view. There was no moon in the Spirit World except for that one. There were no more moonbeams scattering over the water around him, no more sharp, bright, beautiful woman pulling him on. The water around him stank like death.
He wanted to scream. The sound climbed into his throat but stopped, trapped until he gave up and cried.
Flotsam on the Wind
"So are you going to come into the gondola anytime soon?" Smellerbee asked, and Jet pulled his arms around himself.
"No."
She shrugged. "Then if I bring you something to eat out here, will you take it?"
"I'm not- yeah, sure, you got any of those little meat wrap things left?"
She jumped back down the rigging without answering. When she came back a few minutes later, he still hadn't moved. She tossed him the meat wrap and sighed. "You going to sulk the whole way?"
"I'm eating! I'm watching the sky," he exclaimed. "How's that sulking?"
"You should come inside," she just said. "It's getting cold."
"It's not that cold, you shouldn't worry." But he turned around and walked foot over foot down the metal plank like a cat.
Longshot glanced back when they slipped back inside, both of his hands on the wheel, and Smellerbee went to stand next to him. "Seriously, wha gets me is why you're even sulking in the first place," she told him. "We won."
"Sure." Yeah, they won. The big, bad Firelord was defeated. Everything was supposed to be right.
But there was a new Firelord. The throne hadn't even changed families. He was the last one's oldest son, and a liar. Jet felt like he was choking on it sometimes. And the way he had tricked them all into thinking they were the ones who won made it hurt worse.
They had the Earth Kingdom back, but the Fire Nation shouldn't have been allowed to exist, baleful and as strong as ever, lurking in their islands. They weren't going to know what it was like to be afraid of the soldiers getting closer and closer to their homes. Jet's people didn't even have the trees anymore. The village had taken them back.
Uncle
Tom-Tom never felt right standing in the portrait hall. All the tapestries of the Firelords, hanging there, staring down at him, left him feeling like they could tell he didn't belong, that he wasn't one of theirs. When his parents had packed him up and sent him to the palace, he had cried. They told him to hush up. Be quiet, play his cards right, and he could become a power player, like Old Man Iroh, an uncle to a Firelord, trusted. That if Iroh had really wanted power, he could have been Firelord himself, they never mentioned.
It seemed like he had to walk through the portrait hall to get anywhere. This his sister's family eying him from the embroidered cloth, or at least the family she had married into, the family her children were part of, not his. he wasn't even sure what he was doing there.
"Hey Tom-Tom." Leishang stepped out from behind a column, and he jumped, just about coming out of his skin.
"What are you doing here?" he bleated.
His niece smiled unrepentantly. "I just wanted to ask if you were coming to the zoo with us today."
"I wasn't, ant it's Uncle Tom-Tom anyway." He folded his arms and tried to look grown up.
"Oh come on," she groaned. "I'm more older than Roku than you are older than me."
"But I'm still your uncle," he said, trying to keep his eyes from swinging back to the portraits.
The crown princess sighed dramatically. "If you don't want to come with us, I guess I'll just have to tell Roku, and then he's not going to want to come, and I'll be stuck with him crying all afternoon."
"It' not going to work," he tried to say, but she dragged him after her anyway.
Quiet Please
The only good thing about convoy tanks was that they ate up distance the same way they ate up coal. Lieutenant Zhao sat in the pilot's chair and kept his eyes straight ahead as the flat, monotonous desert rolled past.
Convoy duty was long, and boring, with no real possibility of advancement, a dead end position, and it made Zhao grind his teeth together as he drove. And when the anger burned itself out, the boredom lulled him into wanting to close his eyes.
There were times he honestly believed he was going to see desert and gear shifts in his dreams, and when he saw the tower poking up out of the dunes, that's what he thought had finally happened.
"You see that tower thing too, Lieutenant?" the voice came buzzing into the cockpit.
As Zhao pulled the speaking tube down, he breathed a sigh of relief. "Pull over. I'm going to take a look."
"But our orders say-" the man stuttered.
"Who's the one leading this convoy, me or you?"
There was a static-filled pause. "Copy that."
~*~
Zhao's feet hit the decorated tower walls as he repelled down the inside of the building. The rope dangled above the floor, too high to jump, but maybe, if he did it right, long enough that he could swing his way onto one of the many colonnaded walkways lining the walls. When he reached the bottom of the rope, he began to rock.
"My, aren't you in a predicament," a gravelly voice whispered in his ear. Zhao spun around on the rope to face the owl spirit, breathing hard. "What have you come here for, little human?"
"I wanted to see what it was," he said, mouth dry.
"You came to explore," it murmured "To learn. I thought humans had forsaken that."
Bow Your Head
This story takes place in the same universe as a drabble I wrote for the previous bingo, On Your Trembling Knees.
~*~
Zuko woke up on the ship, face throbbing, but the fever broken, and the delirium that had shielded him from the rest of the world banished.
Banished.
His uncle put his father's proclamation into his hands. The rice paper was smooth, and it made a swishing noise as he unrolled it. He was banished.
Banished. Cast adrift until he could find and capture the Avatar.
He let himself wonder idly, briefly, what his father would think if he really brought him the Avatar in chains, Azula in chains. Azula, who he had seen struggling to make the water in the turtle-duck pond move and had said she would kill him if he tried to tell. Azula, who was angrier that he had seen her struggle than that he had seen her bend something other than fire. Azula, whom he had seen showing off a new airbending move for their father.
Zuko cried. The tears only came from his unbandaged eye, only ran down the unscarred half of his face. He was thirteen. He had challenged a man to an Agni Kai, and he was crying because he could never go home. He let his uncle throw his arms around him, and mumble soothing lies into his shoulder, but he wanted so badly to push him away, push it all away, and retreat to the fever delirium where he and his father weren't both pretending there was a chance he could come home.
He broke away and marched out of the cabin. The ship's deck rang under his boots, and he stared over the rail of the ship's bow, forward, so he didn't have to look back at the Fire Nation, falling out of sight.
Uncle followed, and put a hand on Zuko's back. And Zuko's mouth couldn't form the words.
On His Children
This takes place in my Lightning Strike AU, previous installments for which can be found linked in entries on my meme tag.
~*~
Kazumi and Youko were using the great big dragon desk as a fort while Zuko was trying to draft a proposal. The girls clambered around his feet throwing bits of crumbled up paper at each other and pretending they were fireballs. The paper bounced off his legs comfortingly as the girls giggled and shrieked.
"Come on," Youko said, throwing a paper ball at her sister's head. "You're dead. Say it."
"No, you're dead." Kazumi poked her. "I hit you with lightning."
The spasm started in his arm. He dropped the stylus and shoved the paper out of the way of the ink splatters before his legs collapsed. He fell out of the chair, and he rolled to keep from kicking his children.
When it stopped, he stood up and righted his chair. Kazumi glanced up at him and went back to throwing paper at her sister. One of them, probably Youko, was going to tell Mai later that dad had one of his fits, and Mai was going to pretend she wasn't worried, but the girls weren't worried.
It had been eleven years since the physicians had said he would be dead within the year. Each time they saw him, they tutted and said that it would be any day, but he wasn't dead yet.
Hadn't stopped everyone at court from trying to figure out how Leishang ticked so they could string her up on puppet strings before she even became Firelord. Like Mai would let them.
"Don't hit your sister with lightning, Zuko admonished Kazumi, wagging his finger.
Didn't stop him from feeling like he was dying.
Sticking her bottom lip out, Kazumi poked her sister again.
So he didn't kick them out from under the desk, because he didn't know how long he would get to watch them.
She's Within
This takes place in my Mirrorverse AU. Previous installments can be found linked in entries on my meme tag with others linked in this entry.
~*~
"She's stopped trying to set fire to the nurses," Azula's physician told him and Zuko's heart leapt. "But I don't think I could say she's any less mad."
"Oh," he rasped, barely audible.
The hospital was beautiful, with flowering trees lining the pathways and a clear, swift stream winding its way through the complex. Azula had her own private courtyard off her room. On bad days, the nurses locked the door to it, but on good days, she got to sit on her swing in the sun.
The physician knocked on the door, and when she didn't answer, flipped open the lock and held the door open for Zuko. "I'll be right out here if you need me," he said before locking the door behind him.
When the lock clicked shut, Zuko shivered, feeling trapped, like this was his cage and not Azula's. She stood in the doorway to her high walled garden. "Hello Zuzu."
Zuko managed a smile. "Hey, Azula."
"It's nice to see you big again," she said, coming inside and sitting down on her bed. "You don't give me as hard a time when you're big. I know you're cuter little, but the first time, I didn't get to appreciate because I was little too, and now I don't get to appreciate it, because you're always hiding from me."
"I'm sorry, Azula."
"You shouldn't, Zuzu," she replied smirking. "I can tell where you are by your laughing, anyway."
~*~
"She won't... get better now that the Avatar's dead?"
"We've already been able to release the patients the Avatar drove mad," the physician said. "Your sister's madness is different. It will probably never leave her."
Zuko leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.
"I'm sorry, My Lord."
"Thank you. Just..." Zuko swallowed. "Keep taking care of her, okay?"
Keeping Time
The ship's ramp groaned as it lowered onto the peer, and Sozin favored it with a dubious glance. "Which idiot had the idea to build an entire ship out of iron?"
A woman in peasant-best clothes, stiff with sea salt and starch raised her hand as her head ducked.
He ignored her and faced his chief engineer. "You should have fired her and sent her home in disgrace."
The old Firelord's young wife and even younger son stood behind him on the dock, and the boy grabbed at the flapping insignia flags.
~*~
Azulon climbed up the ramp of the first metal warship officially part of the Fire Nation Navy. The fifteen-year-old Firelord flicked the side of the ship to hear the iron ring. "How do you keep it from rusting?" he asked curiously, uncomfortably aware that maybe he should have asked that before he ordered a hundred more metal ships built.
"We use a special alloy, My Lord," the engineer who his father had dismissed said excitedly. "All of the iron on the outside of the ship is mixed with other metals. And you mentioned, you'd like to see the hot water system?"
"Yeah, if I'm going to be traveling in one of these things, I want to know I can have a hot shower."
~*~
It was small and old, and creaked like it was coming apart. Zuko lay in bed and stared at the iron ceiling of his cabin, ignoring the throbbing pain in his face and the sour smell of the metal all around him. The ship his uncle had scrounged for him had been top of the line when his father was born, and should have been scraped when Zuko had been. And his uncle puttered around, filling it with dried flowers, which Zuko set on fire
The Wind's Birth
Ty Lee was a fighter. She had always been a fighter, she hoped she would always be a fighter, airbender or not, and if Aang couldn't bring himself to understand that, then she could leave and go wondering. That was a perfectly Air Nomadic thing to do, right?
She opened the fan and brought it down. The air it pushed in front of it propelled her off the ground, and she tucked in her legs, to flip over. It was strange the way she had done that a hundred times a day, without the fans, without ever realizing what it meant. The fans just made it so much easier. She could fly with the fans.
She'd told Aang that, and he had held up his glider, as if wondering why that wasn't good enough.
The Air Nomads didn't have any weapons, forgotten, lost, or ceded to other nations. The fans were a weapon, and they didn't belong. Ty Lee had never used weapons before she went to Kyoshi Island, and now, she wondered why that was.
She launched herself off the balcony and let the wind carry her and her fans. It ghosted over her face and whipped her breath away. Spinning in the air, she pulled her fans higher and the air rose underneath her, sending her skyward. The canyon winds buffetted her. It took all her strength to cut through them and keep herself from being smashed into the cliff face. She fought them.
Aang looked at her family and talked about the last of the Air Nomads, and Ty Lee wondered how to tell him that the Air Nomads were dead. He was the last of them. They weren't coming back. But her family could be the beginning of a new Air nation, if he let them.
Hew and Join
She used to sit on the floor and stare up at them when she had been little. Back then, they had sat on one of the highest shelves, unused. But her grandfather still took them down to polish, and she had stood on the balls of her feet, leaning over the table to watch his gnarled, knotted hands run oil and rice paper over the blades. He used to laugh at her and tell her about the days before the war, when swordsmen like him had to travel from town to town looking for work.
Ursa's parents would chase her back to her schoolwork, or out into the sunlight most of the time, but sometimes grandfather told them to let her stay, and no one said no to him.
He died in the morning. That night, after everyone was asleep, she moved the swords into her room and hid them under her bed. The oil stunk up her sheets, and her dad begged one of the guards to teach her what to do with them. Years later, she suspected he was worried she had cuddled them in her sleep. She hadn't. She'd just cuddled the bedding that had smelled like the oil grandfather used on them.
Ursa had been too young to hold them, and when she stopped being too young anymore, the moves had sunk into her body. The dao swords moved like they were alive, like they moved her. One day, she cut an apple in half on the second prince's head, and Ozai had given her a deadly look. And then he asked her to marry him.
Her grandfather had been famous. Everybody remembered him, talked about him when her hands held his swords.
And when she wielded those swords, no one remembered she had another grandfather.
Family Resemblance
This also takes place in my Mirrorverse AU. It takes place before "She's Within"
~*~
His hands traced circles in the air. Zuko breathed, steady calming breaths. The letters from Aang were locked away in an unused office. Aang himself was a thousand miles away in the Earth Kingdom. Zuko could breathe and be calm for once. His heart wasn't hammering in his chest. He knew the right thing to do, and he could see it. The lightning, his uncle had told him, came from drive and determination, but Zuko had never lacked that. Azula said it came from steadiness, and a mind at rest, but she had gone crazy and still kept it. His dad used to say it came from certainty.
Zuko glanced down at the burn on his chest and let the lightning pour out of him and into the sky.
~*~
Swallowing down acid, Zuko stepped forward to greet the Avatar. Aang smiled and waved at him from his bison's saddle, bubbly and animated, and Zuko forced down the thought that maybe there was an Aang in there separate from the spirit of the Avatar, innocent and trapped. He had to be certain.
When he kicked out a fireball at the Avatar, knocking him off Appa's leg as he slid down, the people in the courtyard gasped together. He could already hear what Aang would tell people if he lost. He went mad, just like his sister, isn't it just so sad?
The Avatar's eyes glowed white. He started to rise. And the lightning hit him just like Azula's had.
Smoke curled at the ends of Zuko's fingertips, as he folded his arms, blinking. The sunlight on his face suddenly felt just a little bit cleaner, the courtyard a little bit brighter. "We'll cremate him," he said, voice shaking.
The body stopped its twitching. The avatar spirit was dead, along with Aang.
Transfer of Property
Warning for Suicide
~*~
Qiang sat in the tent with his knees splayed and the soles of his feet pressed together. His wrists were chained. His ankles were chained. There were guards ringing the tent. He had lost, and he didn't care if they gave him back to the Earth Kingdom. He'd be executed either way.
His head shot up when the Fire Nation prince strode into the tent. "Hello General."
"Hello General," Qiang answered back.
Prince Iroh carried a knife on his palms. "I'm told that if I release you, and you return home, you will executed for the shame of surrender."
Qiang refused to react.
"And that after they execute you, they will take away your property and leave your family bereft.
"Yes," he answered, voice clipped. "I know."
"But if you did something to prove that you weren't a coward, that you didn't surrender because you were afraid to die, if you did something to restore your honor..." Prince Iroh sighed. "It's a pity you will never get that chance."
He set the knife, Qiang's knife, down in front of his prisoner, and Qiang could see the inscription, dancing in the candle light, "Never give up without a fight." Well Qiang had fought, damn it, and lost, lost horribly.
Prince Iroh faced him with a painful smile. "I don't think we really need to keep you chained up like this, General, do you? I'll speak to the guards."
~*~
Iroh waited in his own tent for one of the guards to shuffle in and mutter the news in his ear. He stood up and walked down the corridor between the tents. The soldiers milled around and parted for him as he passed into the tent. The knife lay in the other General's still-warm hands. Iroh bowed his head and took the knife.
Avatar Horror Picture Show
"Going to 'The Boy in the Iceberg' dressed up as us and shouting the lines back to the actors is becoming a thing, you know."
"Mmm," Aang said.
"And Sokka's started going," she continued, "Dressed up as Wang Fire, and people have started calling him 'Jock Itch', so..."
"Mmm." Aang said again. It was the only thing he could think of to say.
"And Ty Lee and Suki have started switching costumes, and I saw Mai last week with those horrible giant mouse ears on her head."
"Mmm," Aang repeated, wondering just how many times she had actually gone.
"And I swear I caught The Boulder dressed up as Toph, and that's something I never want to see again."
"Mmm."
"And people keep asking Zuko when he's going to leave that scrawny Mai person and date a real woman, you know, like me."
"Mmm." It was more high pitched this time, almost a squeak.
Oh, she had his attention now. "And I've been thinking of throwing myself into his arms like I do on stage."
"What!" Aang hit the ceiling an floated back down, rubbing his head.
Katara snickered.
"That's not very nice," he told her, sulkily.
"No, but it's funny."
He sat down and stared at his hands. "So people are really still going to see that thing?"
"Yeah," she said, putting an arm around his shoulder. "It's a big hit."
"But it's so awful," he stuttered. "You mean people actually think it's good?"
Katara shook her head. "I don't know, I don't think anybody actually thinks it's good. I think that's the point, it's so bad that it's funny. You know, to people who aren't us."
"People are really weird," Aang said softly. "So do you, like, go to these things?"
She grinned. "I dress up as Iroh."
Keeping Score
They sat on the chunk of ice, drenched, their furs clumped with salt water. Pieces of their canoe floated between the icebergs, and Katara watched it drift away with a knot of despair. "You call that left?"
"You don't like my steering," Sokka said flatly. "Well, maybe you should have waterbended us out of the ice. "
Katara glowered at him and started to shiver. The water let every little bit of the cold into her clothes and onto her skin. The water and the cold burned. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering and forced down the misery and the fear that they were going to die out there, lost, without a canoe, or firewood, or dry clothes. "So it's my fault?" she yelled, wondering if maybe she still could waterbend them home. It couldn't be that hard to find their way back. They had done it before, and if they stayed on the ice raft, and she kept making waves to push them back home...
"I knew I should have left you home," he howled resentfully. "Leave it to a girl to screw things up!"
Katara rounded on him, cold, and tired, and ready to waterbend him into the water instead. They could wait a few more minuets to try to get them home. They wouldn't freeze to death in a second. "You are the most sexist, immature, nut brained," she groaned. "I'm embarrassed to be related to you!" It was easier to fight Sokka, away from the village, away from Gran Gran, who would tell her to be nice to ber brother (but never told Sokka to be nice to her). It was easier to fight with Sokka than sit down and To put off finding out she couldn't do it for as long as possible.
Lovely Girl
Ursa wasn't royalty. She was barely impoverished nobility, and her marriage and title didn't change that. Azulon liked her because she did what she was told.
"We have to do something about her!"
Ozai rounded on her, hands in fists. "You will not tell me what to do with my own child."
Ursa stayed very still and gathered her courage. She closed her eyes. "Our child."
His fists tightened and his lip curled. "Ursa..." he warned.
"Don't, Ozai," she whispered. "I gave birth to her. I am her mother. Azula is my child as much as she is yours."
His teeth clenched and his face contorted for a second, before he smoothed his features and looked at her like she wasn't there. "I indulged you too much with Zuko."
"What are you talking about?" she demanded hoarsely. "When have you ever indulged me?"
He clasped her shouldered and leaned in over her, and something inside made her want to grit her teeth and dig her heels into the polished volcanic stone floor. "When Zuko was a baby and he was sick all the time, all of those times you wouldn't come to my bed, because oh, no, he needed you too much. We have children to be strong heirs. he wasn't one of course you could see that, but I let you coddle him."
"Yes, you were very generous in letting me keep our son alive," she growled.
"I let you decide what to do with Zuko, and now you think I'll let you decide what to do with Azula, but I won't Ursa." He squeezed her arms, and she flinched away.
"We have to do something about Azula, Ozai," she said, falsely calm, the daughter of a disgraced house talking to the Firelord's son. "You can't make that change."
Bad News Goes Far
When the boys came to get their sky bison cubs, every woman who had a son that age wanted to teach them, to get a look at them, to see if she could guess which one was hers, and see if she could pick out noses and eyes, mouths, anything that looked familiar. Everyone did it, and no one admitted it. The men did when the girls left to travel for the first time. Everyone had their students, whom they loved, who were theirs, but no one could help guessing which woman had given birth to whom.
Xing had seen the avatar feeding an apple-plum to his new baby bison, and she had wondered. He kind of looked like her in the right light, but he also kind of looked like Niu.
The last thing she heard before he disappeared was that they were sending him east, to her temple again. They cleaned the temple and repainted murals, until it almost didn't look real. If he was going to live there, Xing thought, he would see through it soon enough. And then he didn't come. The days stretched into weeks before the Southern elders bothered to send someone with the news. They had lost the hope for the world, the messenger told them shamefaced and soft voiced. Xing felt him say it like a blow to the gut.
He might not be hers, she told herself. Fifty women in the room were all having the same thoughts she was. The Southern messenger talked about the hope for the world, and the Avatar. He was too young to have fathered the boy. He had no idea what they were worrying about.
He kind of looked like her. He was the right age. He could be hers. And she just didn't know.
Feathers and Fingers
Her fingertips left shimmering trails on the scrolls. Yue scanned the titles and scroll descriptions, the names of the writers, and artists, and the dates of their lives. "And you're sure you don't mind me poking around?" she asked sweetly, dipping her eyes low.
Wan Shi Tong's beak clicked. "I have never had a problem with other spirits perusing my shelves. It is only humans whom I forbid."
"I was once human," she murmured. "And I don't think I've changed very much."
His neck grew to crane around and gawk at her, eyes flat. "You have no purpose for this knowledge. You are not human. You have no war to fight."
Yue thought back on Zhao's coming and her people fighting him. She thought back on the cold, absent sort of neutrality the Northern Water Tribe had clung to, only temporarily safe from the Fire Nation, who weren't really their problem, because of their inaccessibility. To him, the idea that knowledge and learning shouldn't ever be used, that they just were, was a fundamental truth. She rubbed her fingers over a plaque describing a scroll about fish species in the northern seas, and wanted to ask if he thought a person trapped on the ice who had read this scroll should starve rather than use this knowledge. She wondered if Wan Shi Tong would leave a fire in his library burning rather than use his knowledge to put it out. "Do you really know everything, Knowledge Spirit?" she asked, already knowing his answer.
"Everything that has been written down." She could hear the smile in his voice, the pride.
"Who writes down all this knowledge?" Yue put her finger on the name of the woman who had written the scroll. "How does anything find its way into your little library?"
Tying the Strings
The dead king's fifth concubine sat on a bench in one of the side gardens. The dead king's queen stood by her, holding the hand of the fifth concubine's son, wearing an almost believable smile. The boy clutched his toy bear and strained against her hand, towards his mother. "At least his birthday is auspicious," the fifth concubine mumbled.
"Yes," the queen said. "How very lucky with a conception date like that. Almost a month overdue. I remember how afraid we all were that the boy would die inside you. You held him in for so long to spite me, didnt you? It's alright, you can say it now. I won't fault you."
"If you had ever been pregnant, you wouldn't even think such a thing!" the fifth concubine gasped. She grabbed her son's hand and pulled him to her chest. As soon as his head rested on her shoulder, he let loose a large, loud sniffle. "Go away for spirits' sake. I won. I'm the only one of all of us to have a son, and I am the king's mother, not you."
"You're not his mother, lady," the suddenly former queen told her with a smile. "You're just the woman who gave birth to him. Kuei. Come here."
"No!" The little king clung to his mother's neck and buried his face.
"Long Feng," the old queen said heavily, and the Dai Li agent stepped forward into the sunlit garden. "Take your king from this woman."
The agent lifted Kuei out of his mother's arms and cradled him against his chest. "Your majesty."
"What are you doing?" the fifth concubine demanded, grabbing for her son.
"I told you." The old queen sat down on the bench primly. "You are not his mother."
She laughed bleakly. "You think you are?"
More than Forgotten
"Most scholars agree that the story of Yue, a tribal princess becoming the Moon Spirit is a classic replacement story, that is the mythological representation of one Water Tribe faction achieving victory over another, or possibly representing a Water Tribe victory over the Fire Nation, given that Tui was sister to Agni." The professor clicked the spider-mouse again and the slide show skipped forward. "This myth was probably centuries old by the time The Legend of Aang was first told. Epics, like The Legend of Aang and other Avatar tales incorporate existing myths into themselves, and become a sort of repository, or digest of popular myths. Can anybody name another example of this?"
Bei twisted in her seat and raised her hand, bored, as Toph raised his hand, and of course the professor called on him. "Well, there's Zuko the scarred."
The professor nodded, pleased. "It must have been a brilliant propaganda move at the time to frame the story so that not only was this great Fire Nation culture hero part of the narative, but also, he was fighting on the Avatar's side, against Firelord Ozai, legitimizing the Avatar's side in the minds of Fire Nation audiences. Even more so, Zuko's father was a horrible monster in his myth, so casting him as Firelord that Aang fights made victory over him into a Fire Nation victory. The Legend of Aang also incorporates other Fire Nation mythical figures, like Iroh the Dragon of the West, Piandao and Jeong Jeong, even the Painted Lady, a local cult figure. Some scholars speculate that the writer may have been from the Jang Hui region because of this."
Bei raised her hand. "Do mythology scholars see examples of this kind of myth making today?"
The professor winked. "Whenever a student turns in a late paper."
Moonshadow
She screamed her way into the world as the moon disappeared. She sucked swampy, sticky air into her lungs and opened her eyes to the sky. Her mother shook with the pain and the muscle spasms, her arms trembling around her youngest daughter and kissed her damp hair.
The midwife crouched on the ground with her head in her hands, fighting to still the spinning and pounding in her head and the nausea that threatened to erupt with every second. The moon had been red during the labor, red out of it's proper time. The temple astronomers hadn't predicted the eclipse like they had all the others. And then it was gone, not new, not in shadow, but gone, and her body roiled with it, her bending spilled out of her.
It was almost an easy birth, as easy as any births ever go, easier than it was with her first child, or her second, and the baby girl was strong, sucking on her nipple like a little fiend. She stroked her baby's cheek. It was warm and alive, and she kept her eyes off the sky, and on the face of something right and good, and normal, her living child, and tried to keep her mind there too, and off what the blackness could mean for her older children, and for this new one.
The moon blazed back to life and lit up the sky, the water flowing beneath the tree roots shining like quicksilver. Her baby girl cried harder. She swallowed and wondered if it was an omen that her baby was born when the moon vanished and the sky went black.
She made herself stop wondering and spoke her daughter's name. "Ani."
But the name that whispered in Ani's mind before she learned to speak was Tui.
atlaland bingo, in which I won the Fire Nation 300 points. We won, but sadly, this is my last round, at least for a while.Safe Inside
Toph kept her hands in front of her. The floor creaked and chirped, and there were so many vibrations, if she could just read them. "You know what, I think I'll sleep outside."
"It's the middle of winter. The snow's higher than you are." Suki's voice wasn't that far away. Toph wanted to reach out for it so badly.
"Oh that's nothing. At the South Pole-"
"Sokka!"
Toph made her way over to him, doing her best to ape her normal swagger. And when she walked into him, she poked him hard. "Yeah, Sokka, shut up."
"Hey," I'm just sayin', it could be worse," he said. She could almost hear him throw his hands into the air. She could picture the right vibrations in her mind. "We could be at the South Pole, and you'd have to wear boots, or your feet would fall off."
She put her hand on the wall and followed it to the hearth. "Yeah yeah yeah," she rolled her eyes. "I could be somewhere where there's no earth at all. The horror."
"Just sayin'."
When she stood on the hearth, it felt like she was floating on nothing, like the only thing left in the world was her little stone raft, and all around them was emptiness. It was like being back in the airship, alone. She knew that Sokka was there, and Suki, puffily and grumpily pregnant, and all around her was wooden floor, solid and invisible, but she just couldn't feel it.
Suki waddled over and sat next to her on the hearth. A smaller heart beat underneath Suki's. Toph managed not to lean in. Flopping down beside them, Sokka put his arm around both their shoulders. "Thanks, guys," she mumbled.
"What're you talking about? I just wanted to get warm," Sokka lied.
Fingertips
"So what's this scar everybody keeps talking about?"
Zuko stopped and let his arms fall. "What?"
Toph swung her legs and the base of the fountain jolted with each impact. "Well I can't see it, can I?"
"Aren't you supposed to be teaching the Avatar?" he growled, turning to face her and stretching out his wrists.
"Oh please. I've got him kicking rocks around one of the courtyards." She hopped down and sauntered over. "It'll keep him busy for hours."
Or until he got bored, Zuko thought. "Aren't you being smart."
"Yeah, it's a gift," she snickered. "Anyway, what is it with the scar?"
He bent over to stretch out his back. "Can't you mind your own business?"
She folded her arms. "Hey, you owe me. You burned my feet."
"I said I was sorry!" And he'd been carrying her everywhere for days. She wouldn't leave him alone.
"Sorry doesn't make my feet better," she shot back cheerfully.
"Okay, I have a scar on my face!" he snapped.
"Must be a big one." She grinned widely and elbowed him in the ribs. "The Duke calls you the guy with the scar. How'd you get it?"
"It's none of your business," yelped Zuko, backing up quickly.
She followed. "Can I touch it?" She didn't wait for him to answer. She put the stubby tips of her fingers against it, gently. He stood there, taut and frozen. People didn't touch his scar, except Mai sometimes, who touched it like it wasn't there. But then most people could see it. Most people didn't have to feel it to know it was there. "It is big. What happened?"
"It's a burn scar alright?" he pulled back, against the temple wall.
"Touchy," she said, put she put her hand on his arm, not his face.
Liar's Game
"So if I put the lily here..."
"Ooh, clever," Iroh cooed.
Toph slid her tile forward.
"Oh look, silly me, now I can destroy nearly all of your patterns with my chrysanthemum."
Toph blinked her eyes and made them wide. "Really? I'm pretty sure that's a lily. It goes so well with my lily."
He looked down. "Strange how I ended up with two lily tiles."
"Spooky."
"And two orange-pear blossoms."
Toph whistled, lying back and putting her feet up on the board. Iroh knocked them off.
"And three peonies." He leaned his elbow on the board, and she felt his smothered laughter.
"You sure you didn't get somebody else's set mixed in with yours?" she asked innocently.
"That must be it." They sat on cushions on a wooden floor with a stone game board and stone tiles, and half his advice was genius, and the other half were careful traps, and she had no way to tell which were which. No matter how much she insisted a stone floor would be more fun... He took his elbow off the game board and smiled. She could hear it in his voice. "You might want to move your orange-pear blossom tile near the peony on the left side of the board."
She moved the tile with trepidation.
"Hah!" he crowed, sliding the peony three spaces to the right, and sat back on the cushion. "It does not matter what you change it to. You cannot make any patterns."
"Oh, so now you're going to gloat about beating a poor little blind girl?" She glared.
He leaned forward and put his hand on her arm. "If that poor little blind girl is you..."
"I could sink your tile into the board," she told him smugly.
"What would be the fun in that?"
A Cup of Tea
She held the tray with her head bowed when the guards opened the door. Azulon looked up from the table and waved her in. She kept her head down and glanced up at him discreetly. This, this was why he had picked her for his second son, a sweet little country girl from an impoverished, disgraced family. This accommodating nature of hers, that would have made her a terrible Firelady but made her the perfect wife of a second prince, the way she never treated anything as her due. He favored her with a propitiatory smile.
She poured tea from the pot she had brought into him and handed him one of the cups before lifting her own and taking a sip.
The leaves must have had some mold in them. The tea had a funny taste, so he drained the cup quickly.
She ducked her head and her lips curved up, and his lips curved up in answer. "Was there something you wanted to speak to me about, Ursa?"
"Drinking tea with the woman whose son you've just ordered to be executed isn't smart." Ursa raised the cup to her lips again. "You might be slipping."
The hair on his arms rose. "Ozai told you?"
She nodded.
He wondered if the dizziness he felt was all in his head or if it were real, the effects of poison seeping into his blood and brain. "But you drank too."
"I didn't poison the tea. I poisoned the cup."
He tried to stand up, but his legs wouldn't hold him. As he slumped to the floor, Azulon opened his mouth to shout.
Ursa bent over him. "Shh, don't scream. You're already dead."
~*~
She nodded to both guards on her way out. "He's gone to sleep," she said with a slight smile.
Watersblood
The water rose up to his neck. There was no moon in the Spirit World sky, no true day, no true night, but if he closed his eyes, he could almost feel the moonlight glinting off the water all around him. He could almost see her face in the glow.
His feet left the bottom of the lake, and lifted up as he tilted back, to float in the imagined moonlight, spreading his arms.
"Are you going to come out?" she asked, folding her legs to sit above the water, the light pouring off her leaking through the part between his eyelids. Whenever that light ghosted by him, there was a sick, sudden jolt. Yue. It was Yue giving him an understanding smile, not Tui giving him a mocking one.
"No."
"Don't sulk," she admonished, pushing her hair back from her face.
"Or what?" he asked cooly. There were moments, flashes, where he just wanted to push her, push her and push her and push her hard enough and far enough, to see if he could get her to start pulling. She just poured sympathy down on him like acid. "I can do whatever I want."
She smiled and patted his head until he opened his eyes and looked at her. "Well, if you enjoy sulking, I'll leave you alone."
She stood up, and where she walked on the surface of the lake, traces of moonlight lingered until she faded from view. There was no moon in the Spirit World except for that one. There were no more moonbeams scattering over the water around him, no more sharp, bright, beautiful woman pulling him on. The water around him stank like death.
He wanted to scream. The sound climbed into his throat but stopped, trapped until he gave up and cried.
Flotsam on the Wind
"So are you going to come into the gondola anytime soon?" Smellerbee asked, and Jet pulled his arms around himself.
"No."
She shrugged. "Then if I bring you something to eat out here, will you take it?"
"I'm not- yeah, sure, you got any of those little meat wrap things left?"
She jumped back down the rigging without answering. When she came back a few minutes later, he still hadn't moved. She tossed him the meat wrap and sighed. "You going to sulk the whole way?"
"I'm eating! I'm watching the sky," he exclaimed. "How's that sulking?"
"You should come inside," she just said. "It's getting cold."
"It's not that cold, you shouldn't worry." But he turned around and walked foot over foot down the metal plank like a cat.
Longshot glanced back when they slipped back inside, both of his hands on the wheel, and Smellerbee went to stand next to him. "Seriously, wha gets me is why you're even sulking in the first place," she told him. "We won."
"Sure." Yeah, they won. The big, bad Firelord was defeated. Everything was supposed to be right.
But there was a new Firelord. The throne hadn't even changed families. He was the last one's oldest son, and a liar. Jet felt like he was choking on it sometimes. And the way he had tricked them all into thinking they were the ones who won made it hurt worse.
They had the Earth Kingdom back, but the Fire Nation shouldn't have been allowed to exist, baleful and as strong as ever, lurking in their islands. They weren't going to know what it was like to be afraid of the soldiers getting closer and closer to their homes. Jet's people didn't even have the trees anymore. The village had taken them back.
Uncle
Tom-Tom never felt right standing in the portrait hall. All the tapestries of the Firelords, hanging there, staring down at him, left him feeling like they could tell he didn't belong, that he wasn't one of theirs. When his parents had packed him up and sent him to the palace, he had cried. They told him to hush up. Be quiet, play his cards right, and he could become a power player, like Old Man Iroh, an uncle to a Firelord, trusted. That if Iroh had really wanted power, he could have been Firelord himself, they never mentioned.
It seemed like he had to walk through the portrait hall to get anywhere. This his sister's family eying him from the embroidered cloth, or at least the family she had married into, the family her children were part of, not his. he wasn't even sure what he was doing there.
"Hey Tom-Tom." Leishang stepped out from behind a column, and he jumped, just about coming out of his skin.
"What are you doing here?" he bleated.
His niece smiled unrepentantly. "I just wanted to ask if you were coming to the zoo with us today."
"I wasn't, ant it's Uncle Tom-Tom anyway." He folded his arms and tried to look grown up.
"Oh come on," she groaned. "I'm more older than Roku than you are older than me."
"But I'm still your uncle," he said, trying to keep his eyes from swinging back to the portraits.
The crown princess sighed dramatically. "If you don't want to come with us, I guess I'll just have to tell Roku, and then he's not going to want to come, and I'll be stuck with him crying all afternoon."
"It' not going to work," he tried to say, but she dragged him after her anyway.
Quiet Please
The only good thing about convoy tanks was that they ate up distance the same way they ate up coal. Lieutenant Zhao sat in the pilot's chair and kept his eyes straight ahead as the flat, monotonous desert rolled past.
Convoy duty was long, and boring, with no real possibility of advancement, a dead end position, and it made Zhao grind his teeth together as he drove. And when the anger burned itself out, the boredom lulled him into wanting to close his eyes.
There were times he honestly believed he was going to see desert and gear shifts in his dreams, and when he saw the tower poking up out of the dunes, that's what he thought had finally happened.
"You see that tower thing too, Lieutenant?" the voice came buzzing into the cockpit.
As Zhao pulled the speaking tube down, he breathed a sigh of relief. "Pull over. I'm going to take a look."
"But our orders say-" the man stuttered.
"Who's the one leading this convoy, me or you?"
There was a static-filled pause. "Copy that."
~*~
Zhao's feet hit the decorated tower walls as he repelled down the inside of the building. The rope dangled above the floor, too high to jump, but maybe, if he did it right, long enough that he could swing his way onto one of the many colonnaded walkways lining the walls. When he reached the bottom of the rope, he began to rock.
"My, aren't you in a predicament," a gravelly voice whispered in his ear. Zhao spun around on the rope to face the owl spirit, breathing hard. "What have you come here for, little human?"
"I wanted to see what it was," he said, mouth dry.
"You came to explore," it murmured "To learn. I thought humans had forsaken that."
Bow Your Head
This story takes place in the same universe as a drabble I wrote for the previous bingo, On Your Trembling Knees.
~*~
Zuko woke up on the ship, face throbbing, but the fever broken, and the delirium that had shielded him from the rest of the world banished.
Banished.
His uncle put his father's proclamation into his hands. The rice paper was smooth, and it made a swishing noise as he unrolled it. He was banished.
Banished. Cast adrift until he could find and capture the Avatar.
He let himself wonder idly, briefly, what his father would think if he really brought him the Avatar in chains, Azula in chains. Azula, who he had seen struggling to make the water in the turtle-duck pond move and had said she would kill him if he tried to tell. Azula, who was angrier that he had seen her struggle than that he had seen her bend something other than fire. Azula, whom he had seen showing off a new airbending move for their father.
Zuko cried. The tears only came from his unbandaged eye, only ran down the unscarred half of his face. He was thirteen. He had challenged a man to an Agni Kai, and he was crying because he could never go home. He let his uncle throw his arms around him, and mumble soothing lies into his shoulder, but he wanted so badly to push him away, push it all away, and retreat to the fever delirium where he and his father weren't both pretending there was a chance he could come home.
He broke away and marched out of the cabin. The ship's deck rang under his boots, and he stared over the rail of the ship's bow, forward, so he didn't have to look back at the Fire Nation, falling out of sight.
Uncle followed, and put a hand on Zuko's back. And Zuko's mouth couldn't form the words.
On His Children
This takes place in my Lightning Strike AU, previous installments for which can be found linked in entries on my meme tag.
~*~
Kazumi and Youko were using the great big dragon desk as a fort while Zuko was trying to draft a proposal. The girls clambered around his feet throwing bits of crumbled up paper at each other and pretending they were fireballs. The paper bounced off his legs comfortingly as the girls giggled and shrieked.
"Come on," Youko said, throwing a paper ball at her sister's head. "You're dead. Say it."
"No, you're dead." Kazumi poked her. "I hit you with lightning."
The spasm started in his arm. He dropped the stylus and shoved the paper out of the way of the ink splatters before his legs collapsed. He fell out of the chair, and he rolled to keep from kicking his children.
When it stopped, he stood up and righted his chair. Kazumi glanced up at him and went back to throwing paper at her sister. One of them, probably Youko, was going to tell Mai later that dad had one of his fits, and Mai was going to pretend she wasn't worried, but the girls weren't worried.
It had been eleven years since the physicians had said he would be dead within the year. Each time they saw him, they tutted and said that it would be any day, but he wasn't dead yet.
Hadn't stopped everyone at court from trying to figure out how Leishang ticked so they could string her up on puppet strings before she even became Firelord. Like Mai would let them.
"Don't hit your sister with lightning, Zuko admonished Kazumi, wagging his finger.
Didn't stop him from feeling like he was dying.
Sticking her bottom lip out, Kazumi poked her sister again.
So he didn't kick them out from under the desk, because he didn't know how long he would get to watch them.
She's Within
This takes place in my Mirrorverse AU. Previous installments can be found linked in entries on my meme tag with others linked in this entry.
~*~
"She's stopped trying to set fire to the nurses," Azula's physician told him and Zuko's heart leapt. "But I don't think I could say she's any less mad."
"Oh," he rasped, barely audible.
The hospital was beautiful, with flowering trees lining the pathways and a clear, swift stream winding its way through the complex. Azula had her own private courtyard off her room. On bad days, the nurses locked the door to it, but on good days, she got to sit on her swing in the sun.
The physician knocked on the door, and when she didn't answer, flipped open the lock and held the door open for Zuko. "I'll be right out here if you need me," he said before locking the door behind him.
When the lock clicked shut, Zuko shivered, feeling trapped, like this was his cage and not Azula's. She stood in the doorway to her high walled garden. "Hello Zuzu."
Zuko managed a smile. "Hey, Azula."
"It's nice to see you big again," she said, coming inside and sitting down on her bed. "You don't give me as hard a time when you're big. I know you're cuter little, but the first time, I didn't get to appreciate because I was little too, and now I don't get to appreciate it, because you're always hiding from me."
"I'm sorry, Azula."
"You shouldn't, Zuzu," she replied smirking. "I can tell where you are by your laughing, anyway."
~*~
"She won't... get better now that the Avatar's dead?"
"We've already been able to release the patients the Avatar drove mad," the physician said. "Your sister's madness is different. It will probably never leave her."
Zuko leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.
"I'm sorry, My Lord."
"Thank you. Just..." Zuko swallowed. "Keep taking care of her, okay?"
Keeping Time
The ship's ramp groaned as it lowered onto the peer, and Sozin favored it with a dubious glance. "Which idiot had the idea to build an entire ship out of iron?"
A woman in peasant-best clothes, stiff with sea salt and starch raised her hand as her head ducked.
He ignored her and faced his chief engineer. "You should have fired her and sent her home in disgrace."
The old Firelord's young wife and even younger son stood behind him on the dock, and the boy grabbed at the flapping insignia flags.
~*~
Azulon climbed up the ramp of the first metal warship officially part of the Fire Nation Navy. The fifteen-year-old Firelord flicked the side of the ship to hear the iron ring. "How do you keep it from rusting?" he asked curiously, uncomfortably aware that maybe he should have asked that before he ordered a hundred more metal ships built.
"We use a special alloy, My Lord," the engineer who his father had dismissed said excitedly. "All of the iron on the outside of the ship is mixed with other metals. And you mentioned, you'd like to see the hot water system?"
"Yeah, if I'm going to be traveling in one of these things, I want to know I can have a hot shower."
~*~
It was small and old, and creaked like it was coming apart. Zuko lay in bed and stared at the iron ceiling of his cabin, ignoring the throbbing pain in his face and the sour smell of the metal all around him. The ship his uncle had scrounged for him had been top of the line when his father was born, and should have been scraped when Zuko had been. And his uncle puttered around, filling it with dried flowers, which Zuko set on fire
The Wind's Birth
Ty Lee was a fighter. She had always been a fighter, she hoped she would always be a fighter, airbender or not, and if Aang couldn't bring himself to understand that, then she could leave and go wondering. That was a perfectly Air Nomadic thing to do, right?
She opened the fan and brought it down. The air it pushed in front of it propelled her off the ground, and she tucked in her legs, to flip over. It was strange the way she had done that a hundred times a day, without the fans, without ever realizing what it meant. The fans just made it so much easier. She could fly with the fans.
She'd told Aang that, and he had held up his glider, as if wondering why that wasn't good enough.
The Air Nomads didn't have any weapons, forgotten, lost, or ceded to other nations. The fans were a weapon, and they didn't belong. Ty Lee had never used weapons before she went to Kyoshi Island, and now, she wondered why that was.
She launched herself off the balcony and let the wind carry her and her fans. It ghosted over her face and whipped her breath away. Spinning in the air, she pulled her fans higher and the air rose underneath her, sending her skyward. The canyon winds buffetted her. It took all her strength to cut through them and keep herself from being smashed into the cliff face. She fought them.
Aang looked at her family and talked about the last of the Air Nomads, and Ty Lee wondered how to tell him that the Air Nomads were dead. He was the last of them. They weren't coming back. But her family could be the beginning of a new Air nation, if he let them.
Hew and Join
She used to sit on the floor and stare up at them when she had been little. Back then, they had sat on one of the highest shelves, unused. But her grandfather still took them down to polish, and she had stood on the balls of her feet, leaning over the table to watch his gnarled, knotted hands run oil and rice paper over the blades. He used to laugh at her and tell her about the days before the war, when swordsmen like him had to travel from town to town looking for work.
Ursa's parents would chase her back to her schoolwork, or out into the sunlight most of the time, but sometimes grandfather told them to let her stay, and no one said no to him.
He died in the morning. That night, after everyone was asleep, she moved the swords into her room and hid them under her bed. The oil stunk up her sheets, and her dad begged one of the guards to teach her what to do with them. Years later, she suspected he was worried she had cuddled them in her sleep. She hadn't. She'd just cuddled the bedding that had smelled like the oil grandfather used on them.
Ursa had been too young to hold them, and when she stopped being too young anymore, the moves had sunk into her body. The dao swords moved like they were alive, like they moved her. One day, she cut an apple in half on the second prince's head, and Ozai had given her a deadly look. And then he asked her to marry him.
Her grandfather had been famous. Everybody remembered him, talked about him when her hands held his swords.
And when she wielded those swords, no one remembered she had another grandfather.
Family Resemblance
This also takes place in my Mirrorverse AU. It takes place before "She's Within"
~*~
His hands traced circles in the air. Zuko breathed, steady calming breaths. The letters from Aang were locked away in an unused office. Aang himself was a thousand miles away in the Earth Kingdom. Zuko could breathe and be calm for once. His heart wasn't hammering in his chest. He knew the right thing to do, and he could see it. The lightning, his uncle had told him, came from drive and determination, but Zuko had never lacked that. Azula said it came from steadiness, and a mind at rest, but she had gone crazy and still kept it. His dad used to say it came from certainty.
Zuko glanced down at the burn on his chest and let the lightning pour out of him and into the sky.
~*~
Swallowing down acid, Zuko stepped forward to greet the Avatar. Aang smiled and waved at him from his bison's saddle, bubbly and animated, and Zuko forced down the thought that maybe there was an Aang in there separate from the spirit of the Avatar, innocent and trapped. He had to be certain.
When he kicked out a fireball at the Avatar, knocking him off Appa's leg as he slid down, the people in the courtyard gasped together. He could already hear what Aang would tell people if he lost. He went mad, just like his sister, isn't it just so sad?
The Avatar's eyes glowed white. He started to rise. And the lightning hit him just like Azula's had.
Smoke curled at the ends of Zuko's fingertips, as he folded his arms, blinking. The sunlight on his face suddenly felt just a little bit cleaner, the courtyard a little bit brighter. "We'll cremate him," he said, voice shaking.
The body stopped its twitching. The avatar spirit was dead, along with Aang.
Transfer of Property
Warning for Suicide
~*~
Qiang sat in the tent with his knees splayed and the soles of his feet pressed together. His wrists were chained. His ankles were chained. There were guards ringing the tent. He had lost, and he didn't care if they gave him back to the Earth Kingdom. He'd be executed either way.
His head shot up when the Fire Nation prince strode into the tent. "Hello General."
"Hello General," Qiang answered back.
Prince Iroh carried a knife on his palms. "I'm told that if I release you, and you return home, you will executed for the shame of surrender."
Qiang refused to react.
"And that after they execute you, they will take away your property and leave your family bereft.
"Yes," he answered, voice clipped. "I know."
"But if you did something to prove that you weren't a coward, that you didn't surrender because you were afraid to die, if you did something to restore your honor..." Prince Iroh sighed. "It's a pity you will never get that chance."
He set the knife, Qiang's knife, down in front of his prisoner, and Qiang could see the inscription, dancing in the candle light, "Never give up without a fight." Well Qiang had fought, damn it, and lost, lost horribly.
Prince Iroh faced him with a painful smile. "I don't think we really need to keep you chained up like this, General, do you? I'll speak to the guards."
~*~
Iroh waited in his own tent for one of the guards to shuffle in and mutter the news in his ear. He stood up and walked down the corridor between the tents. The soldiers milled around and parted for him as he passed into the tent. The knife lay in the other General's still-warm hands. Iroh bowed his head and took the knife.
Avatar Horror Picture Show
"Going to 'The Boy in the Iceberg' dressed up as us and shouting the lines back to the actors is becoming a thing, you know."
"Mmm," Aang said.
"And Sokka's started going," she continued, "Dressed up as Wang Fire, and people have started calling him 'Jock Itch', so..."
"Mmm." Aang said again. It was the only thing he could think of to say.
"And Ty Lee and Suki have started switching costumes, and I saw Mai last week with those horrible giant mouse ears on her head."
"Mmm," Aang repeated, wondering just how many times she had actually gone.
"And I swear I caught The Boulder dressed up as Toph, and that's something I never want to see again."
"Mmm."
"And people keep asking Zuko when he's going to leave that scrawny Mai person and date a real woman, you know, like me."
"Mmm." It was more high pitched this time, almost a squeak.
Oh, she had his attention now. "And I've been thinking of throwing myself into his arms like I do on stage."
"What!" Aang hit the ceiling an floated back down, rubbing his head.
Katara snickered.
"That's not very nice," he told her, sulkily.
"No, but it's funny."
He sat down and stared at his hands. "So people are really still going to see that thing?"
"Yeah," she said, putting an arm around his shoulder. "It's a big hit."
"But it's so awful," he stuttered. "You mean people actually think it's good?"
Katara shook her head. "I don't know, I don't think anybody actually thinks it's good. I think that's the point, it's so bad that it's funny. You know, to people who aren't us."
"People are really weird," Aang said softly. "So do you, like, go to these things?"
She grinned. "I dress up as Iroh."
Keeping Score
They sat on the chunk of ice, drenched, their furs clumped with salt water. Pieces of their canoe floated between the icebergs, and Katara watched it drift away with a knot of despair. "You call that left?"
"You don't like my steering," Sokka said flatly. "Well, maybe you should have waterbended us out of the ice. "
Katara glowered at him and started to shiver. The water let every little bit of the cold into her clothes and onto her skin. The water and the cold burned. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering and forced down the misery and the fear that they were going to die out there, lost, without a canoe, or firewood, or dry clothes. "So it's my fault?" she yelled, wondering if maybe she still could waterbend them home. It couldn't be that hard to find their way back. They had done it before, and if they stayed on the ice raft, and she kept making waves to push them back home...
"I knew I should have left you home," he howled resentfully. "Leave it to a girl to screw things up!"
Katara rounded on him, cold, and tired, and ready to waterbend him into the water instead. They could wait a few more minuets to try to get them home. They wouldn't freeze to death in a second. "You are the most sexist, immature, nut brained," she groaned. "I'm embarrassed to be related to you!" It was easier to fight Sokka, away from the village, away from Gran Gran, who would tell her to be nice to ber brother (but never told Sokka to be nice to her). It was easier to fight with Sokka than sit down and To put off finding out she couldn't do it for as long as possible.
Lovely Girl
Ursa wasn't royalty. She was barely impoverished nobility, and her marriage and title didn't change that. Azulon liked her because she did what she was told.
"We have to do something about her!"
Ozai rounded on her, hands in fists. "You will not tell me what to do with my own child."
Ursa stayed very still and gathered her courage. She closed her eyes. "Our child."
His fists tightened and his lip curled. "Ursa..." he warned.
"Don't, Ozai," she whispered. "I gave birth to her. I am her mother. Azula is my child as much as she is yours."
His teeth clenched and his face contorted for a second, before he smoothed his features and looked at her like she wasn't there. "I indulged you too much with Zuko."
"What are you talking about?" she demanded hoarsely. "When have you ever indulged me?"
He clasped her shouldered and leaned in over her, and something inside made her want to grit her teeth and dig her heels into the polished volcanic stone floor. "When Zuko was a baby and he was sick all the time, all of those times you wouldn't come to my bed, because oh, no, he needed you too much. We have children to be strong heirs. he wasn't one of course you could see that, but I let you coddle him."
"Yes, you were very generous in letting me keep our son alive," she growled.
"I let you decide what to do with Zuko, and now you think I'll let you decide what to do with Azula, but I won't Ursa." He squeezed her arms, and she flinched away.
"We have to do something about Azula, Ozai," she said, falsely calm, the daughter of a disgraced house talking to the Firelord's son. "You can't make that change."
Bad News Goes Far
When the boys came to get their sky bison cubs, every woman who had a son that age wanted to teach them, to get a look at them, to see if she could guess which one was hers, and see if she could pick out noses and eyes, mouths, anything that looked familiar. Everyone did it, and no one admitted it. The men did when the girls left to travel for the first time. Everyone had their students, whom they loved, who were theirs, but no one could help guessing which woman had given birth to whom.
Xing had seen the avatar feeding an apple-plum to his new baby bison, and she had wondered. He kind of looked like her in the right light, but he also kind of looked like Niu.
The last thing she heard before he disappeared was that they were sending him east, to her temple again. They cleaned the temple and repainted murals, until it almost didn't look real. If he was going to live there, Xing thought, he would see through it soon enough. And then he didn't come. The days stretched into weeks before the Southern elders bothered to send someone with the news. They had lost the hope for the world, the messenger told them shamefaced and soft voiced. Xing felt him say it like a blow to the gut.
He might not be hers, she told herself. Fifty women in the room were all having the same thoughts she was. The Southern messenger talked about the hope for the world, and the Avatar. He was too young to have fathered the boy. He had no idea what they were worrying about.
He kind of looked like her. He was the right age. He could be hers. And she just didn't know.
Feathers and Fingers
Her fingertips left shimmering trails on the scrolls. Yue scanned the titles and scroll descriptions, the names of the writers, and artists, and the dates of their lives. "And you're sure you don't mind me poking around?" she asked sweetly, dipping her eyes low.
Wan Shi Tong's beak clicked. "I have never had a problem with other spirits perusing my shelves. It is only humans whom I forbid."
"I was once human," she murmured. "And I don't think I've changed very much."
His neck grew to crane around and gawk at her, eyes flat. "You have no purpose for this knowledge. You are not human. You have no war to fight."
Yue thought back on Zhao's coming and her people fighting him. She thought back on the cold, absent sort of neutrality the Northern Water Tribe had clung to, only temporarily safe from the Fire Nation, who weren't really their problem, because of their inaccessibility. To him, the idea that knowledge and learning shouldn't ever be used, that they just were, was a fundamental truth. She rubbed her fingers over a plaque describing a scroll about fish species in the northern seas, and wanted to ask if he thought a person trapped on the ice who had read this scroll should starve rather than use this knowledge. She wondered if Wan Shi Tong would leave a fire in his library burning rather than use his knowledge to put it out. "Do you really know everything, Knowledge Spirit?" she asked, already knowing his answer.
"Everything that has been written down." She could hear the smile in his voice, the pride.
"Who writes down all this knowledge?" Yue put her finger on the name of the woman who had written the scroll. "How does anything find its way into your little library?"
Tying the Strings
The dead king's fifth concubine sat on a bench in one of the side gardens. The dead king's queen stood by her, holding the hand of the fifth concubine's son, wearing an almost believable smile. The boy clutched his toy bear and strained against her hand, towards his mother. "At least his birthday is auspicious," the fifth concubine mumbled.
"Yes," the queen said. "How very lucky with a conception date like that. Almost a month overdue. I remember how afraid we all were that the boy would die inside you. You held him in for so long to spite me, didnt you? It's alright, you can say it now. I won't fault you."
"If you had ever been pregnant, you wouldn't even think such a thing!" the fifth concubine gasped. She grabbed her son's hand and pulled him to her chest. As soon as his head rested on her shoulder, he let loose a large, loud sniffle. "Go away for spirits' sake. I won. I'm the only one of all of us to have a son, and I am the king's mother, not you."
"You're not his mother, lady," the suddenly former queen told her with a smile. "You're just the woman who gave birth to him. Kuei. Come here."
"No!" The little king clung to his mother's neck and buried his face.
"Long Feng," the old queen said heavily, and the Dai Li agent stepped forward into the sunlit garden. "Take your king from this woman."
The agent lifted Kuei out of his mother's arms and cradled him against his chest. "Your majesty."
"What are you doing?" the fifth concubine demanded, grabbing for her son.
"I told you." The old queen sat down on the bench primly. "You are not his mother."
She laughed bleakly. "You think you are?"
More than Forgotten
"Most scholars agree that the story of Yue, a tribal princess becoming the Moon Spirit is a classic replacement story, that is the mythological representation of one Water Tribe faction achieving victory over another, or possibly representing a Water Tribe victory over the Fire Nation, given that Tui was sister to Agni." The professor clicked the spider-mouse again and the slide show skipped forward. "This myth was probably centuries old by the time The Legend of Aang was first told. Epics, like The Legend of Aang and other Avatar tales incorporate existing myths into themselves, and become a sort of repository, or digest of popular myths. Can anybody name another example of this?"
Bei twisted in her seat and raised her hand, bored, as Toph raised his hand, and of course the professor called on him. "Well, there's Zuko the scarred."
The professor nodded, pleased. "It must have been a brilliant propaganda move at the time to frame the story so that not only was this great Fire Nation culture hero part of the narative, but also, he was fighting on the Avatar's side, against Firelord Ozai, legitimizing the Avatar's side in the minds of Fire Nation audiences. Even more so, Zuko's father was a horrible monster in his myth, so casting him as Firelord that Aang fights made victory over him into a Fire Nation victory. The Legend of Aang also incorporates other Fire Nation mythical figures, like Iroh the Dragon of the West, Piandao and Jeong Jeong, even the Painted Lady, a local cult figure. Some scholars speculate that the writer may have been from the Jang Hui region because of this."
Bei raised her hand. "Do mythology scholars see examples of this kind of myth making today?"
The professor winked. "Whenever a student turns in a late paper."
Moonshadow
She screamed her way into the world as the moon disappeared. She sucked swampy, sticky air into her lungs and opened her eyes to the sky. Her mother shook with the pain and the muscle spasms, her arms trembling around her youngest daughter and kissed her damp hair.
The midwife crouched on the ground with her head in her hands, fighting to still the spinning and pounding in her head and the nausea that threatened to erupt with every second. The moon had been red during the labor, red out of it's proper time. The temple astronomers hadn't predicted the eclipse like they had all the others. And then it was gone, not new, not in shadow, but gone, and her body roiled with it, her bending spilled out of her.
It was almost an easy birth, as easy as any births ever go, easier than it was with her first child, or her second, and the baby girl was strong, sucking on her nipple like a little fiend. She stroked her baby's cheek. It was warm and alive, and she kept her eyes off the sky, and on the face of something right and good, and normal, her living child, and tried to keep her mind there too, and off what the blackness could mean for her older children, and for this new one.
The moon blazed back to life and lit up the sky, the water flowing beneath the tree roots shining like quicksilver. Her baby girl cried harder. She swallowed and wondered if it was an omen that her baby was born when the moon vanished and the sky went black.
She made herself stop wondering and spoke her daughter's name. "Ani."
But the name that whispered in Ani's mind before she learned to speak was Tui.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-12-06 02:20 pm (UTC)'The Boy in the Iceberg' is totally going to outlive the Gaang and become a classic. As for the Mirrorverse AU... Zuko's going to go down in history as the 'Man who saved the world', isn't he? It's sad when he realizes not everything can be cured by the Avatar's death. I wonder what will happen to the rest of the Gaang here, though.
Kazumi and Youko are adorable here. They're clearly so used to their daddy having fits that it doesn't faze them anymore. Never fear, Zuko. You're going to outlive every single one of your physicians and live to a ripe old age ;).
Seriously, these all are awesome. Keep up the good work ;).
no subject
Date: 2011-12-06 05:04 pm (UTC)Yes he is, poor man. And he has a long hard, miserable lonely road ahead of him without the gaang. In this verse, Sokka and Katara are already established as sadistic world conquerors who didn't really need Aang's help in becoming evil, so Zuko will have to lead the coalition to apprehend them. Or without the avatar, their own people will hunt them down.
Zuko in this verse has like seven kids, and yes, he outlives all his docs. He and Mai are very happy together, and alive. Why does everybody kill off Mai?
no subject
Date: 2011-12-06 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-20 04:50 am (UTC)A sweet little character piece. There's always something adorable about Toph wintering with her friends, especially when everyone tries not to make a big deal out of the fact that frostbite is pretty much Toph's worst nightmare. Her being sensitive to the heartbeat of Suki's baby was a nice touch.
(I guess Gaoling never got especially cold?)
( Asymmetrical: Safe Inside - Toph and Zuko )
Piggyback rides from Zuko: now my head!canon.
( Pai Sho: Liar's Game -Toph and Iroh )
While he would never live long enough to know the true horror of that day, the "Bei Fong Variation" as it came to be known would largely displace the popularity of Traditional Pai-Sho within Aang's lifetime.
( Wartime: A Cup of Tea - Pai Sho: Liar's Game -Toph and Iroh )
Ninja!badass!Ursa seems to be pretty common these days, so it's weird to see the older (?) variation where Ursa is more of a steel needle wrapped in cotton. Good fic, though.
( Spirit World: Watersblood - Yue and La )
Good. Sad.
Not a lot to say here, sorry.
( Air Ship: Flotsam on the Wind - Jet, Smellerbee, and Longshot )
I hear ya, Jet. This is one of the things about the finale that has always bugged me, and seems like a major hazard for future resentments between the nations. And now we know that the Earth Kingdom isn't even going to get back most of the land that the Fire Nation carved out of it with steel and fire. Unless they get a hell of a compensation deal, the Earth Kingdom's leadership is going to have a bloody shirt to wave for generations to come.
Jet's also got a good point about the Firelord. It's kind of insidious how fantasy gets you to cheer for Our Heroes installing a dependable strongman to run the resident quasi-fascist dictatorship.
( Tom-Tom: Uncle - Tom-Tom, OCs )
Nice character piece for Tom-Tom.
It always strikes me as a little odd to see Maiko-spawn named for Roku. I get that he's the Avatar and Zuko's great-grandfather and everything, but he was also a complete screw-up when it came the most important decisions of his tenure. I'd say it's like naming your kid after Neville Chamberlain but I don't think that goes far enough.
( Hubris: Quiet Please - Wan Shi Tong and Zhao )
Deft little flclet of backstory on Zhao.
( Alternate Universe: Bow Your Head - Iroh and Zuko )
This world is totally boned. Even if they kill Azula, then what? The lack of an Avatar will really screw them up in the long-run. We know from canon that the Fire Nation just doesn't have enough manpower to control the rest of the world, so One World Government is out. If they're very lucky, the FN and EK become peaceful counterweights to each other and the two relatively small WTs end up either Finlandized or polar Switzerlands. And that's not even getting in Spirit World business.
So yeah. Totally boned.
( Greed: On his Children - Zuko and OCs )
Love this AU series. Also, ouch. Poor Zuko.
( Ruination: She's Within - Zuko and Azula )
On the plus side, this AU's Korra won't grow up to be an eldritch abomination. So that's something.
( Metal: Keeping Time - Sozin, Azulon, Zuko, Iroh, and OCs )
Nice arc.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-20 04:51 am (UTC)( Warrior Fans: The Wind's Birth - Ty Lee )
I'm kind of curious how this AU evolves into the Korra Era. Given Ty Lee's sentiments, and Aang being marginally open to set aside the old ways (Northern Air Temple and all that jazz), Tenzin and his kids would probably be pretty different.
Although Tenzin and kids already seem different than the old Air Nomads, mind you. Tenzin's outright married, lives with his non-bender wife who's adopted his culture, and his daughters don't shave the front half of their heads like traditional AN nuns. So I guess this AU and LoK canon actually meld fairly well.
( Sword: Hew and Join - Ursa )
Entertaining take on Ursa's backstory. It's sad to think that those family heirlooms, if Zuko took them along into his exile, ended up on the seabed with an exploded ironclad wrapped around them.
( Lightning: Family Resemblance - Aang and Zuko )
Dark.
( Made in Earth Kingdom: Transfer of Property - Iroh and OCs )
Good backstory for the knife. I guess this is pretty much the AtLA equivalent of leaving someone a pistol loaded with one bullet?
( Latest Fashion: Avatar Horror Picture Show - Aang and Katara, but everybody gets a mention )
I'm only faintly familiar with the whole Rocky Horror subculture, so I missed a lot of the humor here.
( Ice: Keeping Score - Sokka and Katara )
Not much to say here.
( Royalty: Lovely Girl - Ozai and Ursa )
"Fine. What do you suggest we do with our daughter?"
"A pillow, for starters. If that doesn't work, we move on to rat poison."
( Air Nun: Bad News Goes Far - OCs )
Nice to see a continuation of that tantric ficlet. Pre-genocide Air Nomad stories, though... burr.
( Library: Feathers and Fingers - Yue and Wan Shi Tong )
Good contrast of human and non-human mindsets here.
( Puppet: Tying the Strings - Kuei, Long Feng, and OCs )
I got nothing.
( Death: More than Forgotten - OCs )
This makes me think there's been a Dark Age or three, to get history turned into myth that way but to basically have a modern university format to discuss those myths.
( Rebirth: Moonshadow - Tui and OCs )
Creeeepy. Either the old Moon Spirit reincarnated, or Tui and La like to keep fallback souls (a la Yue) ready in case they get their fishy tails punched in. Both options have pretty disturbing implications.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-20 07:06 pm (UTC)Fingertips: Zuko has to pay his dues. *solemn nod*
Liar's Game: *weeps for the game*
A Cup of Tea: I flip back and forth between which variant I write, but I love surprise!badass Ursa.
Watersblood: I don't know what it is, I just can't stop writing Yue and La.
Flotsam on the Wind: This actually touches on some of the themes I'm dealing with in my trilogy, the last two books of which are about what happens once the "good queen" figure is on the throne. It isn't pretty, and it isn't the queen's fault.
Uncle: My theoretical Maiko family has like seven kids. They ran out of family names. (Yeah, Roku's a bit of an idiot)
Quiet Please: Zhao almost makes me sad for Wan Shi Tong.
Bow Your Head: Oh my God, there is just no way this world turns out well. No way at all.
On his Children: This is my feel-good-with-disabled-people-like-me universe. So much happy fluff.
She's Within: Nice, normal, unpossessed child Korra.
Keeping Time: Thank you!
The Wind's Birth: Must not speculate, must not speculate, must not speculate...
Hew and Join: I'm going to pretend for my own piece of mind that those swords he had on his boat were some other pair.
Family Resemblance: Yeah.
Transfer of Property: Yeah, that's about right. Kind of chilling when you think about what Iroh must have done over the years.
Avatar Horror Picture Show: No problem, it isn't that funny.
Keeping Score: That could have been so bleak if they didn't find Aang.
Lovely Girl: Ursa wants to try an intervention and greater supervision, but for the rest of us who aren't Azula's mother...
Bad News Goes Far: What tantric fic?
Feathers and Fingers: Thank you.
Tying the Strings: Is that a good thing or bad thing?
More than Forgotten: Dark Ages just happen sometimes...
Moonshadow: My thoughts while writing this was that she's Tui reincarnated as a normal human girl. They're not immune from the reincarnation cycle any more than the rest of us.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-20 07:22 pm (UTC)It was the prequel to Bad News Goes Far. The one where Aang's mother conceives him and then watches him pick out Appa from a distance? I just think of it as the tantric fic because it had that very ritualized concept for Aang and his agemates. Which was actually really neat, because fics focusing on the Air Nomads typically don't delve into the whole "communal child rearing" angle without becoming judgmental about terrible it was. Yours avoided that.
Tying the Strings: Is that a good thing or bad thing?
Nothing bad. It's just sometimes I can't find anything to say. There were a lot of ficlets to read.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-20 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-20 08:09 pm (UTC)My apologies.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-20 08:14 pm (UTC)