Kindle the Wind (The Avatar! Zuko 'verse) commentfic meme

[attackfish]

That's it, folks, I can't take it.  In the hopes that maybe writing some of what I want to write will get me unblocked on the fic I'm trying to write, I'm giving in and running a commentfic meme for my Avatar!Zuko verse.  Comment with up to five requests, and I’ll guarantee you at least one commentfic.  I’ll probably answer with more, knowing me.  weirdlet , fanficforensics, beboots, and floranna  get seven requests and a guarantee of two fics, because beboots  and floranna  are the best betas ever, and weirdlet and fanficforensics just because.


Also, the 'verse has a title now, Kindle the Wind!


Air, Water, Earth, Fire.

Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished.

A hundred years passed and the new Avatar crashed into the ice sheet that borders our village. Although he is the Fire Nation prince, and it's his family and his nation that have brought this war to the world, I have hope that inside Zuko lies the spark of greatness. In the end, he has to save the world.

Front Cover Illustration

Timeline:

The Turtle-Crab and the Hawk
The first time Zuko struck a Fire Nation soldier in anger
Banner
Meeting Sokka and Katara
The joys of new bending
Zuko surprising himself by being spiritual and philosophical
Gran-Gran criticizing Uncle's parenting skills
Uncle Iroh finds out
Iroh has a talk with his nephew
Agni Kai against Zhao
Laying Aang to rest at the Southern Air Temple
Momo joins the Party
Sokka finds out the women on the ship aren't there to cook (and learns something, maybe)
Act of Providence
The Spinning Gates

Comments

Momo joins the party, Part 1/3

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Zuko opened his eyes to see Katara kneeling beside him, her face lighting up when she saw him move. He yelped, and rolled away from her, sitting up and dusting himself off. His armor was on, he noticed, and right then, it felt very important that even though he had taken all of it off in Avatar Lu's swamp, it was still safe and sound on his body, where it belonged.

He pushed himself up to his feet. "You weren't supposed to come here. I told you, I wanted to do this by myself."

"You keep saying that," she muttered. "You were gone a really long time. Your uncle got worried."

Behind them, Sokka rolled his eyes, but didn't comment.

"Where is he?" Zuko asked sharply. Katara shrugged.

"Ran back to the temple." Sokka stopped poking at the spikes on one of the hundred-year-old Fire Nation helmets to stand in front of the Fire Prince. "Said he had an idea."

"What kind of idea?" Zuko groaned, dreading the answer.

"Beats me." It was Sokka's turn to shrug. "But now that you're awake, we can go find out."

"Sokka!" Katara sprang to her feet to catch up with the boys who were heading towards the curtain. "He wasn't sleeping, he was in the Spirit World."

"Yeah yeah," her brother said without turning around.

"I can't believe you," Katara half yelled. "You're lucky enough to actually watch the Avatar commune with the spirits, and you just- I don't get it."

"Hey, he was just sitting there, and-"

"Would you two just please shut up?" Zuko snarled. It just didn't make sense to him at all. They yelled at each other as if they didn't know words could bruise or break the bonds between them, as if they weren't afraid of each other. Azula never talked to him that way. With Azula, it was all honey sweet and mockery, and when he started arguing with her, he had already lost. And when she was angry and arguing, was when she was almost safe.

They were both staring at him.

Zuko glowered at both of them. "What?"

Katara ducked under the curtain to the outside instead of replying.

"Seriously?" Sokka glanced back at him before following his sister. "You're a little high strung, you know that, right?"

Exhaling sharply, Zuko shoved his way through the curtain after them, sending a hundred years worth of dust into the air in a thick cloud.

Outside in the cool summer air, he didn't feel like he was choking so much. The weight pressing in on his chest was lighter. The Water Tribe siblings picked their way down the snow covered trail, and Zuko hung behind them, mind whirring, trying to get the memory of the heat and suffocating smoke of the abbey where Avatar Baoshi had died out of his mind. Had that been what it was like for the monks here at the temple?

The temple grounds were calm, the snow muffling their steps and the harshness of their breaths. It was easy to pretend that the temple had grown out of the mountain, and that it had always stood empty, that this wasn't a shadow of what it had been. As Katara led them up the steps into the temple courtyard, the stone fountain filled with ice, Zuko steeled himself for the echoing emptiness that waited for them inside.

"It's really..." Katara opened the temple doors. "Pretty."

Zuko wanted to close his eyes. "Yeah."

But as she stepped inside, she pressed on. "I mean, I wasn't expecting that, seeing as your uncle said it was just men here."

"Are you saying men can't make pretty things?" her brother squawked, and Zuko could already feel a headache starting, and he couldn't help thinking that maybe that constant bickering was somehow a twisted kind of fun for them.

"That wasn't what I meant." Then she turned on Zuko. "Help me out here."

He backed up into the temple wall, indignant. "No!"

Katara turned away with disgust. "That wasn't what I meant, Sokka, it wasn't."

"Yeah, sure, Katara, please." Sokka examined a piece of the nearest wall mural. "Not buying it."

Katara rolled her eyes. "Oh, just shut up."

Momo joins the party, Part 2/3

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

"So where did Uncle say he was going?" Zuko asked testily.

"He just said he was going up to the temple," Katara said. Zuko's stomach rumbled. "You missed lunch, by the way."

He scowled at her. Sokka stepped back from the mural and poked his head down one of the hallways. "You didn't miss much," he assured him. "He brought no meat, just tea and these little cake things." Zuko scowled at him too. "So which way you think we should go?" Sokka asked, pointing around at the maze of corridors branching out from the entrance way.

Zuko tried to remember where they had gone two and a half years ago. They had spent weeks there, wandering around, with Zuko convinced that if he just stayed a little longer, looked a little harder, he would find the one clue that would lead him right to his quarry.

Uncle would probably have something wise and moving to say about him hunting his own self, and the very thought set his teeth on edge.

Zuko's ear twitched towards a faint chitter coming from down one of the corridors. "Hey, you guys hear that?"

Sokka slipped away from the mural and across the floor, to stand beside the Fire Prince and gaze into the dark hallway Zuko pointed into. "That doesn't sound like your uncle to me." He cocked his ear and drew his boomerang. "That sounds like... dinner!"

He took aim with the boomerang, angling it for the small shadow perched on the floor, but Katara yelled and grabbed his arm. "Sokka, you can't eat it, it's probably some kind of sacred creature!"

"Aww, Katara!" he cried, tearing after it. "You scared it off!"

"We're supposed to be looking for Uncle," Zuko hissed.

"Well it should be scared." Katara completely ignored him, taking off after her brother and the small creature. "You're trying to kill it!"

Sokka's head whipped around to shout at his sister. "This is why we don't take girls-" He bounced off Iroh's round belly and stumbled back, finishing the sentence almost inaudibly. "Hunting?"

Katara and Zuko caught up a moment later and Iroh beamed at them all. Huge lemur eyes blinked at them, terrified from around the general's leg. He bent down and held out his arm for the creature. "I see you have met my new friend."

Sokka's face heated guiltily, and Iroh favored him with a knowing smile.

~*~

Momo joins the party, Part 3/3

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

On the trail down from the temple, where it was just low enough for trees to grow, but not low enough for them to thrive, a few stunted trees clung to the mountain face wind warped and waist high, bridging the space between bare rocks and tufts of grass and the true forest below. Zuko dove his hand into Uncle's picnic basket sulkily, still a little puzzled as to how he ended up carrying it. The leftover tea cakes were wrapped in thin, translucent pieces of rice paper, and he crumpled one of the wrappers in the bottom of the basket and pulled the cake out. If Uncle was saving the leftovers for anything, that was tough, because if he was going to carry the basket, he was going to get something out of it. He finished off the cake and shoved his hand back in for another one. And it brushed against paper a lot sturdier than his uncle's cake wrappers. His fingers wrapped around it and pulled it out.

It was a scroll. "Uncle, what's this?"

At the reproving tone, Iroh craned his neck to look back at him. "It's my idea," he smiled at his nephew. "For what we should tell your crew we were here for."

Zuko unrolled it. "An airbending scroll? Why would we want an airbending scroll?" There were reasons, of course, that his uncle would want him to have airbending scrolls, seeing as he was an airbender, sort of, but he just wanted to stop airbending, not make it worse. He rubbed the bridge of his nose in frustration before opening the basket lid. "Why would we want six of them?"

Iroh's smile took a small, conspiratorial edge. "If you were bringing the Avatar to my brother, wouldn't you want to prove to him your captive really was the Avatar?"

"Yeah," Zuko said guardedly, glancing back and forth between the Water Tribe siblings.

"Then the Avatar will need to know a little airbending, just to show he can." Iroh folded his arms smugly.

"Uncle." Zuko tried not to growl. "The crew saw airbending at the South Pole. Thats how we knew the Avatar was there."

Iroh waved his hand. "An accident."

Zuko flushed.

"Besides, I am sure these scrolls will come in handy for something else as well." His uncle fell back to put a hand on his shoulder.

"So I guess one of us is really going to have to pretend to be the Avatar now," Sokka said thoughtfully.

"Huh?" Zuko grunted, trying to decide whether or not to shrug his uncle's hand off.

He slowed down to fall in beside Zuko and his uncle. On Iroh's shoulder, the lemur Uncle had found at the temple squeaked and launched himself at Katara to get away from her brother. "Well, you wouldn't get us the scrolls if we weren't cooperating, would you?" Reaching inside the basket, he snatched a cake and shoved it into his mouth. "And if we were cooperating, we would tell you which one of us it was."

Iroh shot Sokka a fond, almost proud look, and Zuko threw his uncle's hand off his shoulder, furious.

"So," Sokka went on. "That's settled. I'll pretend to be the Avatar."

"You?" Katara jeered. "You can't even bend anything! If anybody's going to pretend to be the Avatar, it's going to be me."

"Katara," he said slowly, like she was a child. "You're my little sister, and it's my job to protect you-"

"You think that mean's I'm not going to protect you too?" she fired back heatedly. "You think you can stop me?"

Iroh put his hand back on Zuko's shoulder and reached out his other one for Sokka. "If the Avatar were you, you would have told us long ago to keep your sister out of danger," he told the boy wryly.

Katara shot him a triumphant glance and grabbed the scrolls out of the basket. Zuko watched her march out ahead with them, and felt like he couldn't breathe again, because even if it worked, it wouldn't for long. They weren't trying to stop the crew from finding out, they were trying to put it off, and that never ever lasted.

~*~

When they had launched the steamer back into the water and heaved themselves on board, Zuko stepped back into the cabin to take the helm, but Iroh held up his arm to stop him. "No Nephew, you get some rest. I will guide us back."

Re: Momo joins the party, Part 3/3

[weirdlet.livejournal.com]

Awwww

Re: Momo joins the party, Part 3/3

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The family is coming together!