Written for avatar_500 prompt #57, Mercy.

Summary: Bending hasn't done him much good.

Even Out the Playing Field

"Listen you little punk," the girl spat, grabbing his arm.  "You're going to give me back my money right now."

Skoochy was a punk.  It wasn't like he didn't know it.  It's all anybody from off the streets had ever called him.  It's what they called anybody who didn't back down from getting what they knew they deserved.  "I'm sorry, but I don't have your money," he drawled.  "If I did, I'd be living in a sweet little apartment somewhere with my mommy and daddy."

With a growl, she unzipped her backpack and thrust her hand in, down past the university textbooks and the leaflets.  "You're an earthbender, right kid?" she said calmly.  "I saw you playing with your friends."

"Yeah, you caught me."  He rolled his eyes.  "What, you going to call the cops on me for putting holes in the sidewalk?"

She pulled her newly gloved hand out and shoved her electrified palm into his face.  "You make me sick kid," she hissed over the crackle of electricity.  "Lying, stealing, bet it's only a few years before you join up with a triad."  She dropped him as he sank down to his knees to vomit on the sidewalk.

Written for avatar_500 prompt #56, Celebrate.

Summary: Zuko has already turned misery into an artform.

Turn of the Sun

"Go away, Uncle."

The cabin door creaked shut.  "Nephew, the crew's getting worried."

Zuko doubted that.  He doubted the crew had even noticed.  It wasn't like it was unusual for him to spend all his time in his room, whiling away the monotonous miserable days stuck on this floating ruin of his.  "Somehow I think they'll get over it."

"It would do them good to have something to celebrate," his uncle pointed out, putting his arm around his nephew.  "You are not the only one on this ship who is far from home."

There were so many things to say to that, tumbling over and over, around themselves in Zuko's mind.  Yes, he wanted to say, wasn't it a shame he couldn't be a different, better prince.  "I'm not coming out."

"Then I'll stay here with you."  He rubbed his nephew's shoulder with his thumb.  "Happy fourteenth birthday, Prince Zuko."

Written for avatar_500 prompt #54, Blue.

Summary: Her rigid precision may be all she has left, or like mother like daughter.

Control

Ursa's fire is blue.  She holds it steady in her palm.  Azulon used to watch her when she practiced, that smug, speculative look on his face.  She used to raise orange flames and slowly, carefully raise their temperature until they burned yellow, then white, then bright, clean blue.  She used to cool them down until they glowed dark cherry-rose red.  Sometimes, she would hold one blue flame and one red, one for each hand, just to prove her control.

She used to think she would need that control for the day she entered the navy, for the day she became captain, then admiral, for the days she would fight the war, and the days she would fight Agni Kais.  She imagined she would raise her flames, clear, fierce orange, and use the control she had learned changing their temperature to strike for her enemy's heart.

She looks away from Ozai as they stand before the fire sage.  He leads them to the royal hearth fire, and they hold out their hands.  His fire pours out of him soft and orange, the color of the fire the sage points to.  It joins with the living fire lit by some distant ancestor of his.

And Ursa has forgotten how to make fire that color.

It's the strength of her fire that makes the Firelord overlook her tainted blood.  Her strange, strange blue fire.

The flames change to orange as soon as they leave her hand, blending in with the others and disappearing.

Written for avatar_500 prompt #53, Rules.

Summary: Their life together has become bounded by them, and Mai is still figuring out how to reach for Zuko through them.

The Unspoken Ones

There were rules to sleeping with the Firelord, customs, traditions, nods towards discretion, a thousand and one things they had never had to think about before when he was just a prince.  A prince who was never going to take the throne, they never talked about it, never, but Azula...  It didn't matter.  There were rules now.  There were secret passageways, and chaperones, and a tangle of betrothals broken both times Zuko had left that had to be remade and renegotiated.

There had always been rules to sleeping with Zuko, things to back away from, things that hurt too much to look at.  Things that needed to be lanced or skewered.  Things that were the remnants of Azula's friendship.  Sometimes, she couldn't see through all that to what was theirs, and what they were free to do and be.

There were rules to being a couple, any couple, and it was when the rules began to contradict each other and twist on the page that Mai wanted to throw them away and stare mutely at the wall until it was over.

Just so long, Mai decided, as there was room for Zuko and Mai in the spaces between the rules.

Written for avatar_500 prompt #51, Door.

Summary: She isn't there for herself.

Solid Walls

One of her guards rushed forward to bend the door door open, and Yue stepped though, her skirt sweeping the floor, refined, traditional, and perfect.  She was a princess, a living symbol, wearing a mask that every chief's daughter had worn since the day the palace rose from the ice.

And there was nowhere to get away from it.  Against the walls of her chambers were heavy tapestries, empty porcelain vases from the Earth Kingdom, multi colored woven baskets from the Fire Nation, sculptures from her homeland.  It was as grand as any princess's chambers in the Fire Nation, any royal wife's suite in Ba Sing Se.  The Northern Water Tribe could have a princess, and dress her in fine fur robes and give her rooms like these to dwell in.  How grand and sophisticated they must be.

Her hair is white, her people said to themselves when they saw her.  The moon spirit has blessed her.  How many other nations have their princess blessed by the spirits?  How lucky we are to have her.

And when her guards sealed the door to her chambers for the night, leaving a blank wall, Yue felt her own unused, untaught waterbending answer.

Summary: Ty Lee begins Avatar Zuko's airbending training.  Takes place in the same universe as "Banner".

Author's Note: Wow, I actually wrote a drabble just because.  I haven't written like that for a while...  Anyway, this arose out of a conversation with weirdlet in which we both agreed *SPOILER FOR LEGEND OF KORRA (highlight to read)* that the way Korra's first airbending lesson went was the exact same way Zuko's would have gone were he the Avatar.



( The Spinning Gates (Spoilers for Legend of Korra, chapter two) )

Written for avatar_500 prompt #48, Finish.

Summary: There was a time before the Avatar, and before people knew what the Avatar was.


One Circle Closed

The lakes sank lower with each year, disappearing into the empty dust.  Fewer benders were born each year, and the people who had once lived on the backs of lion-turtles instead of rafts, and bent other people's bending were barely even memories.

No one had seen a spirit in dreams in generations.  The spirits had deserted them.  Only the blood of their greatest bender could bring them back, they whispered.

She was old.  Her children were dead, and her grandchildren were grown.  She put her own head onto the block, but when they raised the sword, her eyes glowed white.

~*~

When raiders came from the islands, his mother grabbed him and his brothers and sister and ran with them into the hills.  Fire burst out of the raiders hands and feet, catching in the thatched house roofs, and he watched it from safety, but when the fire came out of his hands, and the earth trembled with his footsteps, he ran down the hill to fight with the men of his village, and when his eyes burned white, and the voice of an old woman came out of his throat along with his own, no one stood in his way.

~*~

The dragons came out to meet her on the day she was born.  They sniffed her, their whiskers tickling her cheeks.  When they left her again, her parents breathed a sigh of relief.

As her belly grew round and full with her first child, the girl the dragons had blessed drew water from the well.  She pulled her hand up...

And the water followed.  She screamed, the water clinging to her, and she ran through the village as the old Sun warriors spoke of the boy who had driven them away from the Earth shores with earth and fire together.

~*~

As word traveled throughout the world that High Priestess of Fire with her glowing eyes and three voices had died, a woman gave birth alone, far from her clan, in a sky bison saddle.  She took the baby home and he cried into the wind.

His aunt and grandfather said he was the greatest airbender they had ever seen, but it was the day he mimicked the earthbenders at a festival and he earth moved that they realized just how powerful he really was.

"You know," his mother said, "He was born the night the three voiced Fire priestess died."

Written for avatar_500 prompt #46, Hold.

Summary: Song watches the colonists leave, and watches the Earth Kingdom soldiers return.


Stitching Together

The needle and thread slid, catching, and then tugging free of the impediment.  The stitches formed a crooked, sloping line.  "Stop squirming," she said, laying her hand down on his head for a moment before she picked the needle back up. 

"I'm sorry," he grumbled, "but it hurts, and you keep sticking your stupid needle into it."

She stitched another neat X on he skin of his stomach.  "If you didn't want me doing this, maybe you should have ducked out of the way of his spear."  The needle jabbed into him again.  "Or maybe you shouldn't have gotten into a fight to start with."

Out of the corner of her eye, Song could see her mother rubbing aloe-mint paste thickly over the burns on the Earth Kingdom spearman's chest.  Sometimes, she wondered if the colonists who streamed through her village on their way back to the coast would ever leave their shores and go back to the Fire Nation, which rumor said had no room for them anymore.

She sank the needle into his flesh again, and he yelped like a child.  "Careful!"

"I told you to stop squirming."  She pulled the thread hard.  "You're lucky it was a glancing blow.  He could have killed you."

"I didn't do anything wrong," he pleaded.  "I have six daughters, and that soldier of yours was saying we should get less food than the other families because my wife's dead!  They would starve!"

Song ran her needle under the string and pulled the new knot tight.  This was what the Fire Nation had done to the Earth Kingdom, humiliated them, killed them, beat them, starved them, starved their children.  It couldn't last.  "Be careful," she told him instead of what she thought.  "Take it easy for a few days, and that should hold."

Written for round three, Holidays, of the wc_women_fest, a prompting fest focusing on the women characters of White Collar.


( Diana - drew the short straw when it came to planning the office holiday party this year. (350 words) )

( Sara - She and her parents put up a front, but the holidays are all wrong without her sister. (500 words) )

( Elizabeth - first Christmas with Neal around, what do you get someone who seems to have everything and nothing at the same time? (350 words) )

( Alex - Ring out the old, ring in the new (250 words) )

( Diana/Christie - First holiday together (250 words) )

Written for avatar_500 prompt #43, Never.

Summary: Sokka is Katara's older brother.

New Worlds

She was two, and the ice climbed up her legs with every step she took.  She was four, and the snow parted around her when she spun around.  She was six and the waves under their canoe sank into valleys and rose into mountains.

She was eight and their mother...  Their mother was dead.

She was ten and nothing moved.  She was ten and their father was gone.

She was twelve, and nothing moved.

On her thirteenth birthday, she pointed at his watchtower, and told him it was stupid, and it fell down.  Sokka started screaming.  He couldn't stop.  He danced around, grabbed her around the neck and planted a kiss on her cheek.

He sat on the steps sometimes, while she trained with Sourpants-Pakku, and watched her remake the world.

Their dad told him he was supposed to protect her, but how could he when she didn't need it?