Written for avatar_500 prompt #29, Travel.

Summary: Toph can't settle.

Many Homes, No Home

Toph’s feet hit the road.  The sun shines overhead, heating up the stones and the dust, and the space iron in her bracelet.

She just came from Aang and Katara at the Southern Air Temple.  Now she was on her way to Zuko in the Fire Nation.

It would have been a shorter trip if she went to Sokka instead, on Kyoshi island, but she wanted (she needed) the long journey.

Every journey had something wrong with it, boats, ice, all of Ba Sing Se.

Toph tells everybody that she has what she wants.  It isn’t true.  What she wants is for all of her friends to wander with her again, to ramble around the world together, just them, like they used to when there was war, and danger, and an entire nation out to get them.

But she can’t have that, could she?  And she really shouldn’t want it.

fanficforensics recently won the bidding on my help_japan offering of a 2000+ word fic, and after she prompted me, I sent her this drabble to tide her over and also to test out her likes and dislikes before I started her fic.  She wanted Zuko's ship captured by the Northern Water Tribe early in his exile.  The short story I wrote for her, "Holding This Breath", takes place several years earlier than this drabble.  This also fills my wildcard square on atlaland's recently finished bingo, giving me my blackout.


Releasing It

The day the Avatar came to the Northern Water Tribe, Zuko stepped out of his room,cell, it was his cell, he had to remember that, and nodded to the guards on either side of the door.  They used to bend the ice door to his room closed until he melted it open again.

He just kept walking.  He just couldn’t think in there, when that stupid place was actually starting to feel like home, like he belonged, and should stay.

For a moment, he contemplated shining his armor, and just coming down to the banquet, if they would let him wear his armor or even tell him where to find it.

Ever since the rumors had begun to filter through the merchants and sailors, to the young warriors and other people who fet safe gossiping around him, he had made plans and contingencies, and plotted escapes, and stuffed his head full of sea charts and maps of the ever-shifting underwater ice and stone tunnels, and how to steer the little Water Tribe kayaks and manage their strange outrigger sailing ships, and...  And now that the Avatar was there, his mind was just empty, like a rubber ball someone stuck a nail into, flat and airless.

The ice halls twisted and bent outwards, and he walked out onto the palace steps.  He let his legs give way, while the Avatar toyed with the ice under Pakku’s disapproving eye.  The Avatar didn’t even glance at him, and Zuko tried to imagine how he looked, small and harmless in his Water Tribe blue parka and shorn hair, sitting on the steps and blinking in the sunlight.

He had the kayak tucked away in one of the inlets and vials of cotton-poppy juice frozen in the ice under the nest of blankets and furs on the floor of his room to keep the Avatar asleep for the journey.  He knew where he could steal a boat small enough to sail by himself, close enough that he could get there in the kayak.  He had the barrels of fresh water, dried fruit, and jerky stashed nearby.  And he had the route to the Avatar’s room memorized.  He was going to do this.  He was.  It was going to happen.

And the sick feeling in the bottom of his stomach meant nothing.

And he couldn’t think about what it meant that in two and a half years, his father hadn’t ransomed him, or dashed off a treaty with his captors, or even attacked, done anything.  And he couldn’t think about the couldn’t and shouldn’t and what-are-you-thinking-they-will-be-so-mad.  All he should be thinking about was melting through every wall the Northern Water Tribe had and running home.

Written for avatar_500 prompt #27, Sky.

Summary: La grasps for both of them, which is why it hurts.

Glimmers

Tui scampered across the sky.  Her paper lantern bobbed beside her in one hand.  It flew above her head when she let herself fall down to the sea.  She held it aloft, dipping her feet in the water.

La couldn’t touch the lantern.  Tui couldn’t let it touch him, because the water would dissolve the paper and extinguish the flame.  She swung it just out of his reach with a grin.

He grabbed her arm and she grabbed his.  The moon was full and the lantern cover all the way off.  The light from it broke all over the waves.

~*~

Yue walks across the sky, and she doesn’t grab his arm, but she holds his hand.  He has to walk with her.  She won’t drag him.  She doesn’t hold a lantern.  She has a mirror, a disk made out of silver and glass.  She holds it to her chest most of the time, but sometimes, she holds it out to him.

She lets him touch the mirror, those times, but it only reflects the light.  It has none of its own.  His fingers scrape across it.

The ocean water reflects the light too.

With Yue, there are so many mirrors.

Written for the atlaland fic-prompting challenge and red envelope gift fest.


( The Blue Spirit Redux- AU, role-switch. Avatar Zuko and Prince Aang of the Fire Nation (353 words)  )

( Above it All- Katara/Toph, Bondage: “Well, this is a fine state of affairs!” surprizingly g rated (333 words) )

( War Games- Sokka, “Sneak attack, dammit!” (127 words) )

( Mechanical Marvels- Yugoda, first do no harm (200 words) )

( The Shadow Falls- Ty Lee, Holding on to what I haven’t got (165 words) )

( Hands and Feet- Ty Lee and Zuko (150 words) )

( To Become- Avatar Kyoshi (100 words)  )

( With Her- Mai and Ty Lee (100 words) )

( Humming- Katara and Hue (100 words) )

( Pieces- Azula and Iroh (150 words) )

( Editing Out- Mai and Ty Lee (100 words) )

( She Bends- Toph/Yue (100 words) )

( Back to Normal- Zuko and Song (100 words) )

( Left- Katara/Ty Lee (150 words) )

( Stop Spinning- Mai/Zuko (100 words) )

Written for avatar_500 prompt #25, Jail.

Summary: The place can't hurt her anymore, but somehow...
Warnings: War crimes, genocide, and traumatized children

Author's Note: When I was in middle school, one of my teachers showed us a video walk-through of Dachau.  I looked up at it through my little Jewish, disabled, queer eyes, and couldn't figure out what I felt.


Empty, Closed.

The cages were empty, their doors thrown open.  Light poured down yellow and muted from the skylights, and dust swirled on the air, insubstantial in the gloom.  The pumps had ground to a halt a long time ago, and the air inside was as humid as it was anywhere else on the islands, hot, heavy, and unmoving on her skin.

Rust clung to the bars and ate away at the chains hanging down from the ceiling like vines.  Ty Zhi put her hand on the bars, and felt the rust scratch cold against her palm.  Her breath shuddered in her chest.  The place smelled old, felt ancient, like something out of some scroll tucked away in a library corner.

Not like something held over her head since she was born.  Not like someplace that made her father shout at her when he saw her twisting in the air outside the house.  It was the first time her father yelled at her.  It was the first time her mother didn’t soothe her when she cried.  Not like someplace real.

Her mother sat her down and ran her Fire Nation nails through her daughter’s hair, and held her in her Fire Nation arms.  She told Ty Zhi about the Southern waterbenders in their prison, and about the massacre of the Air Nomads, and told her if she was lucky, the Fire Nation would just kill her.

Ty Zhi raised her hand and swirled it in the air.  The air rose up and spun, dragging the dust, rust, and rot around and around.  She grinned wide and wild, hair pulling out of her braid, air whipping his face.  It was beautiful, and she felt so strong and so brave doing it there, bending there.

And then she felt very silly, and very small.

Written for the atlaland team contest, for the "Worth a Thousand Words" challenge. I had to pick a piece of fanart and write a fic using it as my prompt. The art I picked can be found here.

Summary: The hero returns.

( Pigs Fly )

Written for avatar_500 prompt #22, Knight.

Warning: Some very very ablist attitudes on the part of the point of view character

Summary: Kyoshi Island didn’t have mothers.  Kyoshi Island had sisters, in a thin, unbroken green line.

Author's Note: I've been sitting on this for a while.  I actually wrote this as a sample drabble for happiestwhen when I was feeling out what they wanted for their help_pakistan  fic.  As such, this drabble is meant to be a companion to the resulting fic, Drink it Down


Thin, Unbroken, Green

Kyoshi Island didn’t have mothers.  Kyoshi Island had sisters, in a thin, unbroken green line.

Suki washed the blood off her mother’s sister’s daughter’s armor and laced it around her own body.  It gapped and pinched and fit her cousin’s body not her own.  But the warriors would teach her how to fix that.

She painted her face.  It’s soft and sticky, made from egg shells, animal fat, and soot, and the tiny red insects that only lived on Kyoshi Island, and it sat heavy on her face.  Strange.  She always thought it would be hard like porcelain.  She had been afraid it would crack.

The pots of face paint had come to her father’s house along with the armor.  Koko asked what she would have done if their mother’s sister’s daughter hadn’t died, but Suki didn’t have to answer.  There was always one warrior dying.  There was always a new one growing up.

She passed her mother’s sister’s daughter on the way to the dojo.  The woman wore the blue tunic and wide pants of a man or a child again, her hair unbound, her face unpainted.  She gave Suki a smile.  “First day?”

Suki shuddered, and swore to herself that when she died on the battlefield there would be no one-legged, still talking body for her sisters to bring home.

The other Warriors saluted her with their fans as she came in, their faces frozen beneath the forbidding mask of their makeup.

Suki had painted fans at home, pretty delicate things she had first learned with.  But the fans she held now were fans that broke fire.  These were fans that cut off heads.

~*~

Kyoshi Island didn’t have mothers.  Kyoshi Island had sisters, in a thin, unbroken green line.

A woman whose daughters could remember her when they were grown was either very lucky, or a coward.  A woman who made it to see her daughters become warriors was probably both.

There were pirates, and Fire Navy ships, and extortionate Earth Kingdom soldiers, and raiders from Chen.  There were warlords, and chiefs, and village murderers.

But the war was over.  Water Tribe ships guarded their shores.  The Fire Navy stayed within their own waters.  The Earth Kingdom soldiers had been sent home.

For a hundred years, no Kyoshi Warrior had ever retired.

There was a rush, a fear, a bond.  No one could ever mean as much as a sister.  Nothing could mean as much as a battle.  Kyoshi Warriors drank, and sang, and lived it up in a desperate need to do as much as possible before they fell.

There were women all over the world who expected to see their grandchildren grow up.

Suki was tired.

These were written for the atlaland lottery, where I got a random list of seven prompts and had to fill them by the end of January.  Since I posted three of my fills as graphics (and my art is just not good enough to post here) and one of my fills I'm in the process of turning into a proper fic, here are three of my fills.  One of the prompts below is actually a piece of fanart, and the link beside the fill's title will take you to the artist's post on deviantArt.  All fics are between 750 and 1000 words.

( Times Best Forgotton: Past Avatar- OCs, A swampbending Avatar fights the uncle of the Khan )

( Blast Radius: Two Sides- Aang, Katara and Zuko contemplate the same thing during chapter 2.01, The Avatar State )

( Songs in the Static: Future Avatar, OCs, one newly told Avatar doesn't think the world needs her anymore. )

Written for avatar_500 prompt #20, Spontaneous.

Summary: In families, everyone has a job.


The Work of Sisters

Ty Un arrayed her dolls on her bed and watched suspiciously as the maids cleaned the shelves and tables where they had been.  One of her dolls didn’t have any hands anymore.  One had a hole where her nose had been.  She straitened robes, and smoothed hair, and waited for the maids to leave.

And when they did, she put her dolls back in their places, walked out, and shut the door behind her. 

The maids didn’t go into Ty Lee’s rooms.  No one did anymore.  The dust hung thick on the floor, bed, and tables.

Ty Un was supposed to be the good daughter, the one who never bent, and never made trouble for her family.  The one who played with dolls and smiled, and didn’t drink.

They were all good daughters, her parents said, but it was Ty Un’s job.

She closed the door.  She slammed the shutters.  She raised her hands and the dust flew around her in waves and eddies.  It was Ty Un’s job plan her trouble so it was out of sight.  

Ty Lee was gone, and she wasn’t coming back until she wanted to.  So it was Ty Un’s job now to play.

Written for avatar_500 prompt #18, Cut.

Summary: Seeing isn't believing.

Rising Steam

“Come on, come on!” he groaned at his freedom fighters. “They’ll be here soon.” She left him hanging from the tree like a lemon-plum, waiting for the Fire Nation soldiers to cut him down. He clenched his hands into fists, his fingers numb with cold from the ice all around them.

Smellerbee slammed the curved head of Jet’s sword into the ice over his chest in frustration. It bounced off, vibrating in her hand with the blow. “Calm down, Jet! We’re going as fast as we can.”

He growled and banged his head back against the tree. “Then just get out of here!” He could hear the soldiers clanking closer.

“Jet-”

“Leave!” he hissed, and the ice hissed off him, sizzling off his skin. He fell to the ground. The steam curled in the air above him. He could taste the metalic heat on his tongue, and feel the crackle of sparks as they died.

His freedom fighters backed away. Jet’s eyeballs strained against the confines of his skull. “That wasn’t- I’m not-”

He wasn’t. He never had been. This was just something that happened sometimes. It didn’t mean anything.

They kept backing away.

He watched them slip into the shadows under the trees and picked himself up.

~*~

He felt a tap on his shoulder, and he spun around, reaching for his hook swords, but he didn’t have them.

Longshot gazed at him somberly when Jet. Jet saw him and heaved a sigh. He wasn’t all alone. Longshot glanced down at Smellerbee, holding up the swords. He took them and hung them from his belt. “Thanks.”

His eyes roved over the empty tree houses. His freedom fighters weren’t there, to listen to him, or fight him. They were just... gone.

“They didn’t see what they thought they saw,” Smellerbee said sharply.

Longshot put his hand on Jet’s shoulder.

Jet nodded. “They didn’t.” He could still taste the sparks.

~*~

Jet slung a sack over his shoulder and grabbed the treehouse ladder. “Let’s go.”

Smellerbee sheathed her dagger. “Where?”

“Ba Sing Se.” Where everyone else running from the Fire Nation was going.