attackfish | Birthday AU Commentfic Meme!

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Birthday AU Commentfic Meme!

It’s my birth month, and to celebrate, I’m hosting a commentfic meme! I’m in the mood to write some AU fics, so that’s the theme of the meme. I’m open to both Avatar: the Last Airbender and Harry Potter requests, and I’m also taking requests in any of my existing AUs (Except Children of Mars), including the ones I established im my last commentfic meme, as well as new ones. Comment with up to five requests, and I’ll guarantee you at least one commentfic. I’ll probably answer with more, knowing me.

weirdlet ,

beboots , and

floranna get seven requests and a guarantee of two fics, because

beboots and

floranna are the best betas ever, and

weirdlet has a truly bizarre AU I inflicted on her rattling around in her head. Also, anyone who wants me to write anything from my AU of Sun Child needs to ask

weirdlet and

floranna , because it’s theirs.

*Closed and Finished*

Given that this meme has spawned a fair few universes, sorting the fics by requester would be clunky, so instead, I'm sorting them by universe this time.

One Shot Universes:

Another Wacky Day: Sokka3PO and KataraD2 (Star Wars/A:tLA fusion) requested by

avocado_love
Oh Come On, Of Course Zuko’s a HufflePuff (Harry Potter/A:tLA crossover) requested by

avocado_love
Zuko muses on his fellow ruler, his sister, and the big universal questions of morality NOTE-not actually AU, requested by

beboots
Dwarf!Toph (D&D fusion, sort of) requested by

weirdlet
Don’t even ask- I don’t even- What is wrong with you, woman? (Kyoshi Warrior Ozai) NOTE- Not AU, just crack, requested by

weirdlet
Suki's a Firebender requested by

clockwerkchaos
Toph is the one who finds Aang requested by

panaili
Ozai doesn’t allow the Dragon of the West to join Zuko in exile: Parts One, Two, and Three requested by

lavanyasix

Mirrorverse (The Avatar is an evil spirit):

Meetings requested by

clockwerkchaos
Aang's Little Crush requested by

gamiel
In This Verse, Azula Totes Rescues Puppies requested by

avocado_love

Lightning Strike (from this commentfic on a previous meme):

Sneaking out of Bed requested by

lavanyasix
Zuko and Kuei, chillin’ together requested by

beboots

AU of Ice Flows Through:

Mai, taking Azula's plan down from the inside: Parts One, Two, Three, and Four requested by

beboots

Quiet Shadowed Places verse (from this shortfic):

Zuko Finds Out He’s Blind requested by

floranna
Zuko Can’t Get Any Respect requested by

beboots
Fire Bending Masters requested by Hillary (anonymous user)
Agni Kai During Sozin’s Comet requested by Hillary
Toph and Zuko bonding NOTE- crack, and absolutely not universe canon, requested by

beboots

Iroh Dies in S2 (from these three commentfics in a previous meme):

Crossroads of Destiny Parts One, Two Three, Four, and Five requested by

beboots
The Throne Room requested by

beboots
Royalty Lessons requested by

beboots

Fail!Incubus Zuko:

Attempted Seduction *warning for sexual coercion and slavery* requested by

weirdlet
Courting Mai requested by

gamiel

Life Spirit:

Toph Bei Fong requested by

clockwerkchaos
Winter When He Goes requested by

weirdlet
Zuko and Iroh requested by

clockwerkchaos
Sokka and Katara requested by

clockwerkchaos

Koizilla Destroys the Fire Nation (from this commentfic from a previous meme):

Song requested by

clockwerkchaos

Modern Day:

Toph and Aang Meet requested by

panaili
Sleepover requested by

panaili

AU of Sun Child:

NOTE- Sun Child belongs to

weirdlet and an index of fics in that verse can be found here. This AU of the Sun Child AU began in these two commentfics from a previous meme *Warning for heavily implied Rape by Coercion and Sexually Abusive Dialogue*

Zhao and Zura's Child is Born requested by

floranna

Zuko Hurt His Leg on the Run and it Won’t Heal (from this commentfic on a previous meme):

Teo and Zuko Bonding Parts One and Two requested by Hillary
Assistive Technology is a Beautiful Thing requested by Hillary

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Zuko’s eyes opened every morning with the rising sun, and when the feel of Mai’s hand around his wrist sank through to his sleep clouded mind, he closed his eyes again. Face twisted, gut twisting, with furious resignation, Zuko squinted at her sleeping face, and at her fingers. She had been sleeping deeper since her belly had begun to swell. Maybe...

The doctors had been talking to her less about making him rest since her belly had begun to swell too. He’d done his job. The succession was safe.

Zuko knew they were just waiting for him to die, eager for the day his child would take the throne in his place. They didn’t want him to live any longer. He was the traitor, the conqueror, the usurper. He swallowed. Never had he ever thought his own people would see him that way. And if it had been the Earth Kingdom seeing their new Fire Nation rulers that way, it wouldn’t have mattered.

Though what would happen if she miscarried, or the baby died- Those things happened all the time. Zuko resisted the urge to touch Mai’s belly, to reassure himself that their child was still safe. Her hand felt so warm around his wrist. He rubbed her knuckles, and she mumbled in her sleep. Softly, slowly, he pressed down on her knuckles, and her fingers opened just slightly, enough for him to slip his hand out. Tiptoeing, he made his way around the bed to the window and glanced back Mai. Her knives and shuriken darts lay in their sheathes, next to the bed, and Zuko felt the welling up of the familiar sense of shame that Mai couldn’t wear them to bed anymore the way she always had. He spasmed in his sleep sometimes.

She was going to give him all kinds of grief when she woke up and he was already out of bed. The doctors never talked to him about resting, only Mai. They only... Mai didn’t stop trying to keep him alive just because his doctors had stopped caring. Mai still cared.

He grabbed the windowsill hard when he reached it and let out a quiet sigh. He was safe. Sometimes, he wondered if it would be better just to crawl, so he had less far to fall.

Zuko leaned against the wall in a patch of pinkish-orange sunrise light. Blinking the last of the sleep out of his eyes, he stretched his arms and grabbed his toes. The sunlight sank into his skin, muscles, and bones. Fire burst out of his fingers with the first punch, dying in the air. When the spasm hit, he shoved his elbow hard into the windowsill and held himself up on his feet until it passed. Legs trembling, he brought his hand up in front of himself, sparks cracking behind it. The kata came so easily, so smoothly, born of reflex instead of thought, the first one he had ever learned. It felt so good just to bend, to do something more than hold a fire in his hand to read with. It was like-

It was like nothing else. It didn’t matter that what he was fighting was part of him. He was used to that. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t fight the people he really wanted to burn. He was used to that too.

He watched the last of the flames shrivel up and disappear over the empty floor. His heart hammered in his chest, and he didn’t know if it was the longing or the lightning his sister had used. With one last look at where the fires had been, he grimaced and and swung a dressing gown around his shoulders before padding out the door and down the hall to his office.

There was an education reform law he was in the middle of drafting. If the doctors were right, he didn’t have much time. He had better make the most of it.

Gah! Poor Zuko. None of his advisers want to keep the packet after they've gotten the seeds.

I imagine Mai's going to have to spend quite a few years watching out for assassins. If she's out of the way then the Court would have a free hand to mold Junior into a Kuei.

And they all talk to Mai too. Not only do they make Zuko's actions Mai's responsibility, when she has no power to control him, but they act like Zuko can't decide how he's going to act themselves.

Hah, Zuko's going to prove all his docs wrong and live to like, eighty. THe Fire Nation court would eagerly try such a thing. Zuko may have many of the commoners, but the military leadership and the rich nobles hate him. But if they tried, Aang would have something to say about it. *snickers...*

Totally. This is one of those 'verses that just calls for perversely outliving the bastards. Even if it's hard, even if you constantly have to have contingency plans in place for the worst, because everyone knows the worst is inevitably coming soon.

*mental image of tasty 40y.old!Zuko at court, still occasionally dealing with spasms but stomping around being all 'I am stronger than the old regime's lightning, so there'*

And the doctors are old, man. They go before Zuko. Way before Zuko.

At 40, Mai's reaction to a spasm becomes *eye roll* Nothing to see here. Familiarity leaches out the anxiety.

Ayep. My ma's outlived three oncologists- there's something terribly satisfying about that.

"Dear, help your father."

"It's 'Zuli's turn!"

"Now."

"I'm fine, damnit!"

I bet!

They have a chart somewhere with who's turn is which. Which Zuko burns every time he tracks it down.

I don't get it, why doesn't Katara or the Gaang help him? *pouts* loved it so much it hurts.

Because A) he's a prickly prideful bastard who won't admit he needs help, and B) they're busy dealing with the catastrophic effects of a 100 year long world war too? And medically, Katara has done all she could. One of these days I'm going to write her trying with more spirit water, and having it fail.

O.O Sad, sad AU, I like it! :-P

He lives a ridiculously long time in this AU, though, proves all the docs wrong, and reforms his country, and has a truly absurd number of children, and living with a chronic illness is not so bad. *Pets him* Not as sad as it could be, even if it rankles.

Yeah, it's hard but once you get used to it, have a routine, it gets better. That's why I like this AU so much, because living with it isn't something we see a lot in fiction. Or in modern society.

That's because our culture (mine anyway, don't know what your culture is, and I shouldn't make assumptions) tells us chronically ill and disabled people that we should hide ourselves and our disability, and our living with it away. *shrugs* I like to write characters just dealing.

Well, where I grew up not where I was born don't have a lot of patience for the disabled. Most restrooms don't have wheelchair access, the disabled parking is never enforced and most buildings are adapted for wheelchair access. So yeah, it's the whole out of sight out of mind mentality. It's weird because where I was born, they have all these laws about helping disabled people and anti-discrimination but yet they seemed so obsessed with "fixing" people.

Most people don't get that you can have a disability and still have a happy ending. Your disability and your flawed state should always be the first thing you're thinking about, not the history test, or the lunch date with your girlfriend, or the fact that your high school best friend called last week. No, it should be the disability, pricking you into discontentment. As if there is nothing to you bet the disability. And so you have to be fixed, before you can be a person like them.

So I write people with disabilities who live their lives anyway. Petty revenge, and an attempt at cultural change. Maybe it'll sink in with someone.

Yeah, I have a disability and I honestly don't think about it much. It's more of a that is, and not a what it could be. You adapt, work around it, with it when you can. It really annoys me when I end up telling people about it because they're all like: oh that's horrible. It's not, it just is. It's like someone having a darker color of eye and then people being, oh, that's horrible, how do you ever deal with it. Sigh. Anyway, your Zuko is wonderful and I love when he has problems that can't and sometimes don't need to be solved.

Plus, A:tLA fandom's really good about it. I get the most obnoxious comments and reviews in the Harry Potter fandom with regards to disability, but A:tLA has Toph and Teo, and the fandom picks up on that.

He angsts so much more about being a waterbender in Ice Flows Through than he does about having a disability in any of my fics. *feels an utterly inappropriate joke using the phrase "differently-abled" coming on*

Lol! Indeed. The difference being that losing his sight, or his leg are just parts of himself, becoming a waterbender and losing his firebending is more about identity. He is a firebender, a prince. The whole heir to the thrown didn't really get thrown in until after Azulon was dead and his father assumed the thrown. So even that wasn't really him, but being a firebender, it's like someone losing their ethnicity, who they are. I always thought he was an incredibly resilient person after everything that he went through.

Exactly. if I had more courage, I could have written some fascinating things about racial and ethnic politics in that fic. The thing about disability, is my fics are about how the identity is a small piece of you. Ice Flows Through is about Zuko realizing just what a huge part of him it is.

That's one of the things I love about "Embers" and "Enslaved" is that they delves into this uncomfortable arena. My ethnic background is mixed, and I have found that the cultural differences between races is startling, considering how mixed it is in certain places. My brother and his wife are a perfect example of this. You don't realize it until it's staring you smack in the face. And not only race, but economic status. It's interesting when authors delve into this and do it well.

I'm ethnically but not racially mixed, being the daughter of an Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch Jew and an ex-Mormon, and I go around forgetting I'm a relatively religious Jew who speaks Hebrew and wears a Star of David every day, until something like Christmas or Easter comes around and everybody is swept up in the rituals of a world that just really isn't mine, and I keep forgetting that, or until someone says something that makes perfect sense from a culturally Christian perspective (It kills me most when Atheists do it, and then deny it) and assume I think the same way. Then it just hits me sideways, and I realize what it had to be like for people who were forced to convert, or go into hiding, and the kind of mask they not only had to build but remember they were wearing and how everyone around them was trying to rip a part of them to pieces. And I feel so lucky, because my faith and ethnicity isn't the target off the worst of it anymore.

And where I live is majority Hispanic, and most of my friends are Hispanic, and every time I say the word Anglo, I get told I'm not, I'm Jewish, get that through your head. It's another weird reminder, that I keep forgetting I can't assimilate all the way, and I'm the only one forgetting.

Pff, my grandfather was an anglo jew, he married a black puerto rican (consider the times), my dad is bi racial, he married my mom who is mexican with a lot of spanish blood, and here I am. I can pass for white. I grew up in Mexico even though I was born in the US, so culturally I'm Mexican. Protestant too in a country and family primarily catholic. Now that's fun. It's funny because for a long time I didn't think of myself as white, hispanic, black. When I went to school in the States I had initially put white in my forms. :-P

My red-headed Cuban friend's the same. She takes so much shit from other Hispanics because her ancestors were probably mostly pure going back to Spain. And then all the white people around treat her like she's a liar for being pale and Cuban.

I'm blond and green eyed and look like the Swedish on my dad's side, but I have the nose and bones of the Ashkenazim, and once, when I dressed up as Tzeitel for a production of Fiddler, I gave my Egyptian best friend heart failure with just how Arab I looked when the hair was taken out of the equation. And I absolutely do not look out of place in a Synagogue. I'm caught between the occasional random person coming up to me to tell me I look Jewish (really? Are these people devoid of manners and social sense? It still makes my brain hurt) and other people telling me I don't look like a real Jew, because I don't have dark curly hair and olive skin. At least no one places my ancestors on the wrong continent.

My problem stems more from cultural (since I grew up watching US television and adapted a lot of their customs to my own) and religion. My family was the only protestant with my aunts and uncles and grandmother catholic.

Sigh, I haven't had that problem, quite the opposite. I have dark brown wavy hair, white, and green eyes. I'm also very tall. Most people thought I was Russian or German because I have a mild speech problem which gave me an accent even in spanish. Let me give you a little background so you can understand the mexican culture in Mexico. Way back when the spanish colonized Mexico, the had to deal with the natives. So they adapted the Catholic religion to fit their own. It was also a matter of race that mattered and color of skin. If you were spanish that came over, you were practically royalty, born in the colony, still high up but snubbed by other spanish born in spain, mixed race still had rights but were considered at the low end. Native, you were a slave. So even now lighter skin is treated better, though it's not as bad as it was in the US. Mostly, though, it's about money and social status.

For me the main problem was my ideology. I thought differently than most of my peers. My interests were different and thus I was different. I didn't treat people like they were lower than me because of the color of their skin or social economic background. That set me apart. We lived in a nice neighborhood but weren't rich or anything like that. But here in Mexico, it would be upper middle class or lower upper class. People expect things from you. How you are, your interests. It may not seem like much, but we were social outcasts and they let us know it. People were nice enough, but when the teacher has to threaten the class with doing a lottery for who got to take me in their group, well . . . you can imagine.

I'm from New Mexico, where the Mexican and Spanish history has left very similar marks. Old Spanish families still try to lord it over, and part of the reason why the old New Mexican Hispanics and recent Mexican immigrants come into conflict is that usually the Mexican immigrants are definite peasant class, and darker skinned. Hell, we still have a functioning Patron system in the North and the Llano. The Pueblo Indians were actually treated pretty well here, because they were seen as almost civilized and were amenable to being ruled by the Spanish, certainly better than American Indians were treated in the rest of the Spanish Americas, and we have a truly huge population of crypto-Jews, and of course, there was the influx of Anglos, but other than that, we have a lot of the same dynamics up here.

I had the last part, but that was for my disability. My small town treated me like a pariah for it. Really big on the victim blaming there.

Birthday AU Commentfic Meme!

Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences