attackfish

Written for the

atlaland fic-prompting challenge and red envelope gift fest.

The Blue Spirit Redux

The Avatar let his head hang down and his whole body droop against the chains. Aang crept forward, keeping to the shadows around the edge of the room, his breath soft and shallow, careful and quiet.

A rasping, desperate cry burst out of the Avatar’s throat, and Aang’s masked head whipped around. Frogs sprang out of the neck of the avatar’s tunic and croaked their way down the floor, leaving a trail of melting water and slime. “Come back...” the Avatar pleaded, but the frogs didn’t listen.

Aang watched them hop away bemused, but he shook his head and drew his swords.

The Avatar’s eyes bulged in their sockets at the sight of them and struggled harder against the chains locking his body in place. “No,” he gasped, but the masked figure didn’t stop coming, swords raised high.

They swung down-

And cleaved through the iron chains. They fell to his sides, weighing his arms and legs down. He dragged his limbs against them and spun the air around him, lashing the chains against it, but the masked figure only ducked and drew his arms around his face. The winds died down. “Who are you?” Zuko demanded, feet sliding against the broken chains into a fighting stance. “What do you want?”

Aang shrugged behind his mask. He wanted to be back on his own ship with a fruit pie, a game of pai sho and a quiet night with his teacher. But he held out his hand to his quarry anyway.

The Avatar pulled his hand back and held it closer to his chest, teeth tight in a fierce grimace. Aang closed his eyes in a long, slow blink. I don’t get it, he wanted to shout. I’m trying to help you! Okay, he only wanted to help him long enough to get him into a new cell on board his ship, but... That was better than Zhao’s chains, right?

The masked figure’s hand didn’t fall. “Alright.” Zuko drew a long breath. “Well, I guess you can’t be worse than staying here.”

Prince Aang smiled behind his mask and beckoned the Avatar forward.

Above it All

Katara yanked her arm against the vines. “Well, this is a fine state of affairs!”

Toph groaned. “Shut up.” Her feet hung above the ground, and she kept herself as still as possible lest she yank herself free and fall all the way back down to the ground. Which felt like it was miles away, like it didn’t exist at all. Like she could keep falling.

Katara grabbed the vines and pulled herself up. Resting her weight on her hands, she kicked up over her head, bringing up a sharp razer blade of water up to cut through the vines. “This is your fault, Toph, you know that, right?” she yelped, panting, shaking the vines around one wrist loose, and swinging on her still bound wrist. She grabbed the vine that still held her off the ground and worked free the rubbery tangles. When the knot gave way, her hands slid down the vine, and her heart jumped up to bang against the roof of her mouth as she dropped. She clutched as hard as she could, and the skin on her hands burned, but she stopped falling. “You’re the one who got us into th-”She glanced sharply at Toph and stopped. Toph’s face was gray and blank. Sweat poured down her face and dripped into her eyes.

Katara climbed hand under hand down the vines and swung closer to Toph, from one vine to another, until she hung in front of her. She reached her hand out and cupped her cheek.

Toph gasped, and a tear welled up in her eye, but she fought to keep it there instead of letting it fall, and let Katara see it. Katara’s thumb stroked her cheek, and the tear ran down for her to wipe it away. “It’s okay.”

A shiver wracked Toph’s body. Katara petted her face and ran her fingers through her hair to calm her. “Yeah, sure,” Toph mumbled, leaning into Katara’s hand for just a moment. “Just get me down.”

War Games

Holding his boomerang in one hand, Sokka leaned over Appa’s saddle and ruffled his fur. Appa started to rumble his approval, but Sokka tugged th reigns before the sound could escape. With a faint sigh, he circled lower and lower. He eyed his target and held his boomerang high, and when he passed by, he thumped it across the back of her head.

Toph shouted and whirled around, leaping to her feet and rubbing the back of her head.

Sokka whooped and shoved his fist and his boomerang into the air.

“Okay, okay!” she yelled, her feet shooting spires of rock into the air. “You managed to sneak up on me. Happy now?”

He grinned, but she couldn’t see him in the bison’s saddle. He grinned harder.

Mechanical Marvels

When Yugoda had been a child, she had wanted to know how everything worked. She had had her hand smacked for taking apart her mother’s spice grinder, and her father’s blade sharpening wheel, and a dozen other things.

But she had put them back together again, eventually.

When she first went to the healing hut, she saw living things, things that couldn’t be taken apart and put back together again as right as before. She couldn’t make dead things live again. So she had learned how to see how people and animals and everything alive worked without taking them apart, and how to put them back together when they fell apart without her help.

Caring came easily to her. She cared for all of them. But what made her friends into her friends was a wonderwork so much more complicated than her mother’s spice grinder or her father’s blade sharpener, and she wanted to spend her whole life just exploring it.

Sometimes, the men and the nonbending women all forgot that the people who could put them back together were the ones who knew best how to take them apart.

Sometimes Yugoda wanted to forget that it wasn’t right to.

The Shadow Falls

Azula stood high and commanding, like a statue that moved, barely human. “No, you miscalculated!” she raged. “You should have feared me more!”

Ty Lee’s blood hummed in her veins. It vibrated until she thought it was going to shake her skin off her body, shake her apart. She turned to Azula like a spinning spoon turned to the south pole. Mai was unimportant. Mai was a shadow. Azula was the light. Azula was the one who-

Mai was an idiot. Azula was going to kill her. She’d always known, she thought they’d both always known, that if Azula was angry, nothing went well. They weren’t meant to have their own lives. They weren’t meant-

They couldn’t fight her.

Mai was a shadow.

Like her.

She was moving before she realized it. Her fingers found the pressure points in Azula, and she fell.

“Come on.” She tugged at Mai’s arm, terrified. “let’s get out of here!”

They had to leave before the world righted itself.

Hands and Feet

She found him in the courtyard, flipping over onto his hands and coming closer to crying every time he fell.

“You have to keep your hands in front of you like this,” she said, holding them up, and he whirled around, mortified, but he tried it that way. When he started to fall again, she caught his legs. “You have to move them against the fall, feel?”

“Yeah.”

She let go. He walked a few steps and beamed up at her, and she had never seen him like that before.

And when he tried to walk back to her and overbalanced his legs knocked her to the ground too on his way down, and they laughed together, and he gave his hand to help her back up.

Five years later, he walked on his hands to laugh at her and call her a freak. She wondered what that made him.

To Become

“Not my Kyoshi.”

Chubby, awkward Kyoshi ran behind her brothers and sisters as fast as she could just to keep up. Sloppy, imprecise Kyoshi’s bending always got away from her. Quiet, uncertain Kyoshi couldn’t be the Avatar.

“We tested her when she was born, remember.”

“Yes, but you went away!” She stared at the Earth Sages who had come for her daughter wide-eyed with something like panic. “Surely there were other babies-”

“She’s the one.”

When her daughter came home four years later, in her war paint and her armor, stronger, surer, and two heads taller, she didn’t recognize her.

With Her

Mai needed Ty Lee. Ty Lee smiled at everybody, even after Azula, even while they sat in that cell together. Mai didn’t. She could stand against anyone, and fight, kill or die, but she couldn’t smile the way Ty Lee could, letting everybody see. Mai wished she was brave enough.

Ty Lee needed Mai. Ty Lee smiled at everybody, even when it hurt, when she hated everything. Mai didn’t. When she was angry, she let everybody know. Ty Lee could stand against anyone, and fight, kill or die, but she couldn’t stop smiling. Ty Lee wished she was brave enough.

Humming

She swatted at the bug, and it buzzed away before she could kill it.

“You won’t notice them, eventually,” Hue told her, eyes opening and closing lazily.

Like how she had stopped noticing the heat, how in the South Pole, she hadn’t noticed the cold.

“There was a woman living in the Fire Nation who taught me how to bend the blood inside other people’s bodies,” she whispered, sitting down beside him and crossing her legs. “It wasn’t that hard.”

He squeezed her shoulder and backed away, at her indrawn breath and convulsive shudder. “Stay as long as you need.”

Pieces

There were pieces of the world that looked real, so real that everything else faded to gray around them. Those were the pieces she needed to avoid. Azula clung to the gray, to the things that were real, even when they didn’t look it. Her mother was standing there, bright and red (and sharp) but her uncle was gray and steady. “What are you doing here?”

“I heard you were doing better.” He unlocked the door and locked it behind him.

There was padding on the walls, and she leaned against it, eyes clear. “Aren’t you afraid to be locked in here with me?”

He shook his head. “Are you doing better?”

She twitched her foot. “Do you trust me?”

“No.”

“Good.” She laughed tiredly. “So why should I tell you if you won’t believe me either way?”

“Do you want to tell me?”

“No thanks.”

“Then don’t tell me.”

Editing Out

“So once upon a time, there were two girls.”

“Three girls.”

“Which one of us is telling this story again?”

“Sorry, Mai.”

“These two girls grew up together, and they were best friends, but once they had grown up, they had to go their separate ways.”

“Is there a handsome prince in this story?”

“There are no princes, and no princesses.”

“Azula and Zuko were there, you don’t get to forget that.”

“Yes I do.” She looked around at the metal cell. Azula ruined everything she touched, and Zuko-

“Well I can’t. It can be a good story anyway, though.”

She Bends

The moon was just a giant rock in the sky, and there wasn’t a single rock Toph couldn’t bend. “So... you come here often?”

“Hi Toph. It’s good to see you.”

“You here for something special?”

“Just wanted to see you.” She rested her hand on Toph’s shoulder and Toph cupped her own hand around Yue’s pretty cheek.

She couldn’t feel her footsteps, but she could feel her touch, and she could feel the pull of her on her blood. “You can do that any time you want.” Toph bent the moon’s face to her and pressed their lips together.

Back to Normal

The records are a mess after the war. It takes almost a year of searching squashed around war reparations, and education reform, and when he finally finds her, he learns she was sold to one of the ferries that took refugees into Ba Sing Se for meat. He thinks back on that rotten food he tossed over the ferry railing and feels queasy. He figured she would be pulling a cart somewhere.

So when his soldiers go to Song’s village to help rebuild, they can’t bring her ostrich-horse back.

So Zuko goes with a string of gold coins and guilt.

Left

Ty Lee bites. She doesn’t look like it, but she bites. And Katara loses her patience and starts grabbing everything she can reach. She tickles, and she pinches, until Ty Lee’s breath comes in short little gasps of laughter, and the tears well up in her eyes.

Her fingers jab into Katara’s arm, and it falls limp to her side. “You little-” Katara snaps, and pins Ty Lee down with her other arm.

But Ty Lee’s hands come up again and Katara’s body goes numb and falls on top of her. She squirms helplessly as Ty Lee flips her off to sprawl on the pillows. She wraps her arms around Katara’s neck and slips her tongue inside her mouth. She sucks Katara’s tongue into hers. Katara tries to touch her.

And Ty Lee leaves, but she does it with a smile and a wink, and a promise to come back.

Stop Spinning

It’s like she doesn’t know him. They let her out of prison, and send her home like the world is supposed to just start turning on its axis again, and she is just supposed to forget it ever stopped.

So she goes home. She jumps out at him from the shadows and helps him dress, and he holds her like he’s coming home too.

Like he won’t forget the whole world has changed.

She doesn’t know him. He’s someone new now. But when he holds her, the world isn’t there anymore. She kisses him, and holds onto him, and hopes.