attackfish | The Avatar_500 Jump Start Posting And Comments Meme

Alright, I'm unwilling to let

avatar_500 go without a fight, so I am going to incentivize participation. Write and post a fic for Round 65 - Air, and I'll fill a drabble request of yours. Comment on all of the fics in the round (everybody said they wanted more comments), and at the end of the round, link me to all of the comments and I'll fill a request for you. Do both, and I will fulfill three requests for commentfic.

The rules for posting to

avatar_500 can be found here.

You don't have to belong to

avatar_500 or have ever participated in it before to earn a request for commenting, and if you do want to join to post a fic for the round, all you have to do is click the "join the community" button, and you're in, easy.

About which I will not write (so don't request):

Ty Zula
NC-17
Incest
Ships where one party is much older or younger than the other(s)
Rape
Other people's OCs

Other than that, everything is fair game.

The deadline to post fic is Saturday December 1st at 11:00 PM EST. The deadline to post comments is Saturday December 8th at 11:00 PM EST.

Fics in The Round So Far:

Marking Boundaries by

attackfish
The Need to be Seen by

lalunatique
Playtime at Air Temple Island by

wolfs_lament
What Are the Odds? by

c3childs
Wrong by

chordatesrock
Four Element - Air- Third Stanza by

clockwerkchaos
How Tenzin Met Pema by

lavanyasix

Fills:

For

wolfs_lament:
For a story: Hufflepuff Zuko, Secret Tunnel

For

chordatesrock:
   For a story: Holding This Breath: the Aftermath of Kidnapping Aang
   For commenting on everyone's fics: Quiet Shadowed Places: the Cooler
   Bonus: Zuko/Toph, all grown up and surviving state dinners

For

lalunatique:
For commenting on everyone's fics: Ty Lee and Suki - Sake

For

somariel:
For commenting on everyone's fics: The Grand Lotus puts out a call

For:

c3childs:
   For a story: Hama - Katara wasn't her first pupil *Warning for violence and death*
   For commenting on everyone's fics: Amon - the vigilante of Republic City
   Bonus: Yakone - he owns Republic City

For

lavanyasix:
   For a story: Lin Realizes Toph is a dirty cop
   For commenting on everyone's fics: Pre-series - Korra encounters prejudice due to being half Northern and half Southern
   Bonus: Ozai marries his son off into an insultingly low-ranked colonial noble family. Zuko/Kori

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

http://avatar-500.livejournal.com/225572.html

Hama - Katara wasn't her first pupil.

Warnings (big warnings) for graphic violence, and blood, and death, and bad things.

~*~

"What's the point of practicing like that anyway?" He pressed himself against the bars of his cage, thin legs poking through. "There isn't any water here."

"Hush," she rasped, body too dry to wet her mouth. "I need to concentrate."

"Concentrate on what?" He let his arms fall away from the bars and swing to his sides, and Hama couldn't help staring at them, and how thin and knobbly they were, like twigs. She tried to place him. "You're not bending anything. None of us are ever going to get to bend anything again."

Yuna's boy. He was what, maybe fifteen or sixteen? He can't have been more than ten when she left, and now look, he was old enough to go to war and become a prisoner. She laughed at him, coldly. "Not if you think like that, you won't."

"The guards are going to catch you. They're going to take you out and beat you. You really want that to happen again?" He licked his cracking lips, but it didn't do any good.

Hama's eyes flicked back to him as she began her forms again from the beginning. "You can watch for the guards if you're so worried."

"I don't get it." He said flatly. "There's no water."

No. Not there, where the air was so dry it stole away their tears and their sweat as soon as they formed, where the cups of water they were given weren't enough to keep their mouths from tasting like dust or relieve the pounding in their heads, where the guards measured their piss and beat them if they didn't think it was enough. And it was never enough, because the water was never enough. "Yes there is, don't you feel it?"

He stared at her as she continued her way through her forms as if she had gone crazy, and she smiled fiercely back. She got it, and he didn't.

"There's water inside of me," she said, her voice low, and she wondered what he saw with his sad, terrified eyes. She was a young woman still. Did he see a grownup, someone who had already been fighting when he had been a little boy, or did he see the closest thing to a pretty Water Tribe girl he was ever going to see again? Was that why he was worried for her? "And inside of you, and inside the rats that scurry around this prison." She let her voice drop even lower until he had to lean into the bars to hear her. "And inside the guards carrying the keys. We'll bend their blood."

"That's impossible. Nobody's ever-"

"I already have." She grabbed the bars of her cage. "I made the rats come out of the shadows last month, and under the full moon, we will break free, and they won't be able to stop us, because I'll control their very bodies."

"Show me," he hissed. "If you're so great, show mw while the guards aren't looking."

Hama looked away from him. "I need the full moon and the power it gives us."

He shook his head. "I don't believe you."

"Wait." She smiled. "The full moon's in two days. I'll show you."

~*~

Hama pulled her arm back, and the rats slumped forward, and then, with a flick of her wrist, the rats flew out of her cage, and back into the shadows.

The boy's lips has parted in astonishment, and he closed them, siting there with his legs hanging out of his cage, silently until he managed to speak. "Can I try?"

"Go ahead." Hama smirked. "Nobody's stopping you."

He breathed out. His hands tensed into claws, and she could see him grab hold of the water in the rats' veins. Two of them jerked forward, into a patch of moonlight between the cages when he moved his arm. He let his arm fall, and they ran off, chittering into the darkness. "I think I can do more."

"That's good." Her eyes didn't leave his. "That means I'm not alone."

He pulled his legs back inside the cage. "It felt really..."

"Powerful?"

"Yeah, I guess." He gulped. "Weird.

"Help me." Hama reached her hand through the cage bars. "You want out too, don't you? We'll take our freedom together."

"Yeah." He nodded. "We'll get everybody out together."

~*~

"Go slower." Hama ordered, deliberately taking even longer to finish her own form.

"Yeah, yeah, I know, go slow, so you can get every little bit right." He rolled his eyes and pitched his voice high and mocking, and Hama wondered who exactly he was supposed to be making fun of. He certainly didn't sound anything like her. "I know how to practice forms."

"You go slow so that you don't catch the guards' attention." She thought the fact that she restrained following it up with "you idiot" was very kind of her.

He flushed, and slowed down, properly chastened.

~*~

But it didn't last, not that Hama thought it would. He was a child.

"Stop moving," she breathed. Wasn't he the one who was supposed to be so worried about the guards, she wondered.

But her warning didn't come soon enough, and the guard shouted out as he rounded the corner. "Hey you! Stop that!"

The boy stumbled in the middle of his leap and crashed to the floor of his cage, legs askew beneath him. Hama slumped back against the bars of her cage and watched, eyes blank as she could make them.

As the other guards sprinted from their posts to the prisoner, lying sprawled in his cage, the first guard unlocked the bolt on the boy's cage and yanked open the door. "You, boy," he shouted, grabbing the boy and threw him out onto the prison floor. "Were you trying to bend?"

"No!" he yelped, cowering against the ground. "I swear, I was-"

"Shut up!" the guard yelled, shaking him until his head rattled up and down on his neck.

It was then that the other guards began to catch up. The prisoners, trapped in their separate cages could only watch, their eyes boring into the guards, as the first kicked the boy in the ribs. The air in his lungs spilled out into the room. Years Later, Hama would swear she had felt it, even though she knew there was no way she could have.

Some of the prisoners clutched the bars and screamed out. Hama heard them as if through layers of snow. The guards kicked the boy, and hauled him up in their arms to punch him, and dropped him back to the ground to kick him again. His moans, louder in Hama's ears than the screams all around her, gurgled out of him with flecks of his blood.

~*~

All through the night, Hama sat awake, pressed against the bars of her cage and listened to the air bubble in and out of his lungs. She snaked her arm out of her cage to grab his own hand, left dangling out of the bars, and felt him grip her back. So she was the one to hear his breathing stop, and feel his hand go slack in hers.

~*~

The next morning, a guard poked the boy's body through the bars. "Hey, guys, he's not moving!"

Hama listened to the recriminations, the you-weren't-supposed-to-kill-hims, and the well-it's-your-fault-for-kicking-his-ribs, and the everybody-just-shut-ups, and found that she didn't care at all about what they were or weren't supposed to do.

~*~

The moon rose in Hama's blood. She opened her eyes, dispelling the fitful sleep she had been chasing, and twisted her hands into claws, and waited for a guard to pass near enough to her. She was escaping, and she was, she decided, doing it alone, so that nobody else could mess it up.

The Avatar_500 Jump Start Posting And Comments Meme

Re: For Stories

Hama - Katara wasn't her first pupil pt 1/2

Hama - Katara wasn't her first pupil pt 2/2