And now for something completely different
Jan. 2nd, 2010 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonance_and_dSo I've been working on this fic, with the premise that it was much more than 100 years between the time Aang was frozen and the time Katara and Sokka found him. So we have the same characters, and there's still bending, but the level of technology is at the level of present-day Earth.
And... I was doing it because I was procrastinating on my other stuff, but now it's 12000 words long and I think I'd better start posting it or I'll start losing momentum.
BUT: It is written in totally random snippets, which are not in chronological order. I'm talking 25 separate drabbles or oneshots so far. I don't think I want to post them together, but posting them all separately would result in massive spamming.
Thus... I am going to follow the format of some memes I've seen, and put the drabble-length snippets in the comments of this post. Then I'll make another post where I figure out what order everything should go in and archive it.
Confused? So am I. But I'm going to try it anyway.
And... I was doing it because I was procrastinating on my other stuff, but now it's 12000 words long and I think I'd better start posting it or I'll start losing momentum.
BUT: It is written in totally random snippets, which are not in chronological order. I'm talking 25 separate drabbles or oneshots so far. I don't think I want to post them together, but posting them all separately would result in massive spamming.
Thus... I am going to follow the format of some memes I've seen, and put the drabble-length snippets in the comments of this post. Then I'll make another post where I figure out what order everything should go in and archive it.
Confused? So am I. But I'm going to try it anyway.
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Katara believes in legends
Date: 2010-01-03 01:24 am (UTC)At home, Gran-Gran would tell stories about ancient times, when their tribe had lived at the south pole and they had a huge city all of ice, made by waterbenders.
“Back then, there were four nations,” Gran-Gran says. “Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. But then the fire nation attacked...”
Katara likes listening to the stories. Sokka just laughs, and leaves the room. He's too old for stories, these days. He thinks he's smarter than that. He's been moved ahead two grades now, and he'll be going off to middle school soon.
Katara is still in grade school. Sometimes at night she stares out her window at the moon. She can feel something pulling at her, or maybe it's pushing, and when she gets angry near water, weird things happen.
Bending is a legend, everyone tells her. But everyone says that no one lives at the North Pole, too, and she knows that's a lie. She's dreamed of them, of a huge city of ice and of two fish in a tiny pond, circling each other forever except when they don't, and even though she doesn't understand any of what it means, she knows it's true.
Re: Katara believes in legends
Date: 2010-01-03 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-03 01:45 am (UTC)He knew Aang was alive. He was part of Aang, after all, even more than the rest of his previous incarnations.
He was supposed to be a guide, but Aang was sleeping, and without a purpose, Roku found himself drifting off from time to time as well.
He drifted off for a while, and when he woke, his temple was gone. He thought at first that it was one of the oddities of the spirit world, that a building could just vanish, but then he saw that moss had grown in his hair and his beard, and realized that he had been sleeping for a very long time indeed.
After that, he wandered.
The world was falling more out of balance every day, and Roku could see spirits migrating. They were leaving the mortal world, going deeper into the spirit world.
“Wait,” he called after them. But his voice was no more powerful than a breath of wind through the trees.
There were spirits here that did not remember the Avatar. And he couldn't blame them.
Far away, he could feel Aang's breaths getting slower and his heartbeats fainter, and he was afraid to sleep because the world kept changing on him if he closed his eyes.
“Wake up,” he whispered to Aang, but he was powerless to wake the boy from his slumber. “The world needs you.”
Aang slept on, and finally, Roku slept, too.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-03 02:10 am (UTC)It wasn't a party, really. It was just her, and Ozai, and a couple of friends.
(They hadn't been friends before, but they'd had a couple of bottles of rum together, and now they were all the best of friends.)
There were tablets on the walls. Hundreds of them, from the ruins of the great walls of Ba Sing Se. Ursa was working on a project with them, which is why she had the key.
“What are these?” Ozai slurred.
“Prayers,” Ursa said. She began reading them to him. It seemed like the thing to do, because she was too drunk find more alcohol, and the tablets were even more interesting when she was drunk than when she was sober, somehow.
“Please give our children the gift of manipulating fire” she read. “Oh Agni, spirit of fire, if we have offended you, look upon us now with favor and-”
The rest was smothered in a hungry kiss. Apparently Ozai was not as interested in the tablets as she was.
Their friends had wandered off to another part of the building, and Ursa thought she probably ought to be worried about the damage they would do to the exhibits.
But then the kiss turned to something more urgent and heated, beneath the solemn gaze of those old prayers, and she stopped thinking about anything much at all as Ozai's mouth moved to more interesting places.
Later, the head of the department took her key and gave her a lecture about letting drunk hooligans into the museum, and she decided to pick a new major because the professors kept glaring at her. And much later than that, she realized that praying to the spirits in jest was, perhaps, a bad idea.
But by then, it was too late.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-03 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-03 09:06 am (UTC)...especially considering how much I have written down already in my Big File of AU Doom . I have too much time invested to stop now. Continuation is the only option! :D
no subject
Date: 2010-01-03 02:31 am (UTC)Zuko moved a lot when he was a kid. It was the fires. They'd gone through two houses because of him, and one school (Though no one ever found out about the school.) And those were just the times when no one caught the fires in time to put them out.
His mother took away the matches, and hid the lighters, but it didn't matter. Zuko wasn't doing it on purpose, and he wasn't doing it with matches. For a long time, he didn't know he was doing it at all. He would just get angry, and then something was on fire, and he didn't know how. Worst was when it happened in his sleep. Then he'd wake up burning and terrified, and end up in the hospital again.
“There were no matches,” his mother sobbed to the nurses. “No lighters. I don't know how he keeps doing this.”
He was covered in burn scars (though not as many as anyone had any right to expect), and his mom dressed him in shirts with long sleeves to hide them.
He was six years old.
It wasn't his fault, he always insisted. He didn't know where the fire came from. He just woke up, and it was there. It he knew how to keep it from happening, he would. It wasn't like he liked being on fire.
And then he figured out that it was him, and practiced while no one was watching, and things got a little better. He stopped burning himself in his sleep, and he could usually stop smoke from coming from his hands except when he was really upset. (Even then, he kept his hands hidden and no one seemed to notice.)
So things stopped being so out-of control, and his mother stopped worrying so much about him.
Things were quiet for some time, and they didn't have to move to a new house. Zuko stayed in the same school, and he went to class, and the scars faded a little so he started wearing t-shirts.
(What happened to your arms?
There was a fire.)
And then one night he woke up and it wasn't his bed on fire. It was the whole house, and the fire...
His fires, even when they burned him, were friendly. They wanted him to tell them what to do, how to move, and it was only on accident that they burned him.
This fire didn't belong to him. It wasn't friendly. It wanted to hurt him- to hurt everyone. It was angry.
He couldn't get it out of his way. It wouldn't listen to him, and all he could think was that it was under someone else's control, but that made no sense. Who else could do the things he could do?
The important thing in a fire was to get out quickly. Zuko knew that. He'd been drilled over and over again, after the first few little fires. Check the doors to see if they were hot, try to stay low to avoid the smoke. He'd never had to do any of it before, though. He'd just moved the flames away from him, and made a beeline for the front door.
Now, the fire wouldn't listen, and it was everywhere. Later, he wouldn't be able to remember how he'd found his way out. Just a blur of smoke and pain and fire, and then he was outside the door, gasping for air.
Azula was there, and a little way away from her was Dad, on the phone with someone and pacing madly, back and forth. Mom wasn't there.
Azula was sobbing. Zuko had never seen her cry so hard, or so sincerely. And the fire- it was flaring and subsiding a little with her ragged breaths.
“Azula,” Zuko said, and then coughed. “You need to let the fire go. They can't put it out if you don't.”
And he realized there was no way she could understand what he meant- except that she stopped sobbing, and started breathing a little better, and the fire- well, it didn't go out. But it became a little smaller, and more random.
“Where's mom?” he asked. “Is she still inside?”
Azula nodded, still shaking.
He tried to run back in, to save her- the fire was normal now, he could do it- but his father grabbed his arm before he could make it.
“Are you insane? You can't go back in there.”
And there were fire trucks now, and men rushing in to save her.
None of them managed it, and all Zuko could do was cry, and try not to grab the fire at all when he did, because he would only make it worse.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-03 08:41 am (UTC)Later, Azula didn't seem to remember much about the fire.
“I woke up and there was fire,” she said, eyes wide. “So I got out.”
“Where was the fire?” Zuko asked her. “Was it near you?”
“It was everywhere,” she said. And he gave her a hug, because he was her big brother and she should need him to. All she did when she got it was stiffen, though.
So he showed her what he'd figured out, and practiced with her every day. They were staying with Uncle Iroh for a while- how long, Zuko didn't know. But there was a spot behind the garage that wasn't visible from the house, and no one seemed to care very much what they did these days.
“If you use your fire in the daytime, it doesn't try to come out when you sleep. I accidentally set my bed on fire a lot when I was smaller, before I figured that out.”
Azula nodded, and focused on the candles in front of her. The flames grew larger and smaller as she breathed. Huge, then normal. Huge, normal. When Zuko put his attention to them, he could tell that they weren't his flames, and even after weeks of practicing with Azula it seemed strange, that a fire could belong to someone besides him.
Her control was very good. It had taken Zuko weeks to get to that level. It had taken her just days.
“You can set fires if you're having a nightmare, too. So- if you feel like you're going to have bad dreams, don't sleep in your bed. Go somewhere with a tile floor, like the bathroom, and curl up there. That way you can't set the house on fire, just your clothes. ”
She nodded solemnly.
Azula had always been a total brat. She'd made him play with her friends, and she'd ordered everyone around like she was the queen of the world. Mom had said it was a phase, when Zuko had complained. And now he almost wished Azula would go back to trying to humiliate him. He didn't like how quiet she was now. It was like she was plotting something. Except she hadn't done anything awful since the fire. She was being nice to everyone. Maybe she just felt guilty.
(Zuko felt guilty sometimes, and it wasn't even his fault.)
Dad didn't talk to them much these days. He was trying to put together a case against the company that had done the wiring for the house.
“Fires don't just start on their own.” he said, pacing. “There was a reason, and they're going to pay for it.” He shot Zuko a glare as he said this, but Zuko hadn't started a fire in a long time, so Dad's gaze moved on.
Zuko said nothing.
Uncle didn't have to go to work much. He owned a tea shop, and he only had to stop by once or twice a week to make sure that the employees weren't slacking off and that the tea was still excellent.
The rest of the time, he spent with Zuko and Azula. He bought Azula dolls and little castles and pretty dresses, and Zuko got a knife and some worn out old toys from the attic.
“Are you crazy?” Ozai said one day, when he caught Zuko attacking invisible enemies in the back yard with his knife. “Give that here. You could hurt someone.”
So Zuko lost his knife, and Azula's dolls all had mysterious accidents involving the river in the woods near the house, or being left in the driveway just before Dad drove off to work, or being left in the oven just before it was time to make dinner.
(“But it was a cave, Uncle Iroh! The dolls had to hide from a big ugly dragon.” Winning smile, tone of innocence- Zuko knew better, but he didn't care what happened to Azula's dolls, so he didn't say anything. Uncle stopped giving her dolls and started getting plastic swords for both of them, which made everyone happy.)
There were no more fires, and Dad stopped pacing so much, and they had the funeral. Azula kept being not-horrible to him, and Zuko stopped being freaked out by it.
Things were different. But now they were staying mostly the same. And Zuko could live with that.
Daddy's little sociopath
Date: 2010-01-03 08:44 am (UTC)Her mother thought there was something wrong with her.
So she was angry. She stopped giving her mom hugs and she stopped talking to her except when she wanted anything. Her mom was stupid and unpredictable.
Her dad still loved her.
“You're my perfect little girl,” he told her, and scooped her up into his arms and spun her around. Then he put her down. “Why don't you read me a book?”
So Azula picked out the longest book from her shelf, and she read the whole thing to him. It wasn't that long- she could do better- but it was long enough to impress him, and that was what mattered. He smiled at her, and nodded, and everything was okay.
Dad didn't think there was anything wrong with her. He had rules. If you did things right, he loved you. Azula always did things right, so she was loved. Zuko was crazy and used to set things on fire, so he Dad didn't love him as much. That meant that Dad gave Azula whatever she wanted, and Zuko didn't get anything.
It was simple. It made sense.
Mom never made sense, and that was why Azula hated her.
Then Mom died, and it was Azula's fault. Nothing had ever been her fault before. Dad didn't know, so he loved her still, but Zuko knew, and Zuko was just as irrational as Mom, so he still loved her too, even though it was her fault, and she didn't understand why.
But she needed him to show her how to keep the fire under control, so she didn't push him away when he tried to hug her, and she didn't steal his knife, and she was quiet when she wanted to make fun of him.
And then she realized that this was just another set of rules, because the more she acted like she loved her brother, the more he loved her back.
And that was when she realized that other people had sets of rules, too. They were a simple set of rules, but they were so stupid that she hadn't realized it before. You pretended to love people, and they loved you back. And then you got whatever you wanted from them. It was stupid, but it worked.
Now Uncle Iroh loved her because she made tea for him in the morning before school and laughed when he made jokes. He brought her dolls and then he realized that she didn't want dolls, so he bought her plastic swords and had mock battles with her. She won every time, and not just because he let her win.
Dad smiled when she beat her Uncle at swords, and so she always made sure to win. And she kept getting perfect grades at school and never messed up at anything, so Dad kept loving her.
Zuko loved her because she wasn't horrible to him anymore and she took him seriously when they practiced with the fire. He didn't have that much that she wanted, but he kept showing her everything he did with the fire, so she kept pretending to love him back.
Everything was even more perfect than before, except that Mom was dead.
(But she had hated Mom, anyway, so that was okay, too.)
Kya
Date: 2010-01-04 06:17 am (UTC)“It's good for you,” she told Katara, often enough to be annoying. “For a little waterbender, you don't drink a lot of water.” She ran a hand through Katara's hair, in the way she did when she was in a good mood.
Katara made a face. “It tastes gross,” she said.
“It's the natural minerals. They're good for you.”
So Mom kept drinking her well water, and eating bitter vegetables from her garden, and insisting that it was good for them even though no one else would try it.
And one day, she started feeling sick. She had a headache and she felt a little hoarse, and she thought she had a cold.
"I'll be fine," she told Dad. "Don't worry. I'll drink some water, and I'll feel better."
She smiled at Dad, and he kissed her, and then he went to work.
But she didn't get any better for a week, and then she started vomiting, and Katara saw blood in the toilet before her dad whisked her out of the bathroom.
They took her to the hospital, but it was too late.
Katara didn't find out what a lot of the words meant until later. Extreme heavy metal exposure. Groundwater pollution. Kidney failure and arsenic and corporate liability.
They lost her mother. They gained a lot of money in a settlement from the chemical company near their house. If they'd had the money in the first place, they might not have lived so close to the the chemical company. A lot of people apologized. Katara was numb for a while and then she was angry.
She should have slapped all those glasses of water out of her mom's hands. It'd tasted weird. Of course there'd been something wrong with it. She was a waterbender. She should have known.
What good was being a waterbender if she couldn't tell that the water in their well was poison?
Toph learns to bend
Date: 2010-01-04 06:53 am (UTC)But still. She was a bender.
After she'd told him that, Aang went on and on about spirits and balance, and how there had to be earthbenders to balance out all of the other kinds of bending that were resurfacing in the world, but Toph was pretty sure he was pulling the spiritual mumbo-jumbo out of his ass at that point, so she stopped listening. Besides, she knew why she was an earthbender.
She had stood in a cavern with a badgermole, and she hadn't moved an inch as it came towards her. She hadn't been afraid. She had stayed rooted.
And she had thought: I am going to do that. I'm going to make the earth rumble, and see the way they do. I'm going to do it better than they do.
“Show me how to do it,” she'd told the giant things, and they had.
That was why she was a bender. Not because she'd had the right parents, or because she was part of some great balance. It was because she had demanded that it be true, and she hadn't moved until it was.
And if there were spirits watching her, to see what she would do- well, they'd better prepare to see exactly how badass she could be.
Sokka isn't a warrior
Date: 2010-01-08 06:15 am (UTC)We aren't at the south pole anymore, he wanted to tell her. You gathered what was left of the tribe and you took them somewhere where there was food and people and education. And everyone is adapting except for you. Dad went to university, and Bato got a job at an office, and all the other families started living simple middle-class lives without all this spirit mumbo-jumbo and warrior nonsense. Warriors are just a kind of character type in fantasy games, now.
But that wasn't what Gran-gran thought, so sometimes Sokka wore the stupid wolf-tail around the house, just because it made her happy.
And then they find Aang, and suddenly the old legends about bending and spirits and warriors with painted faces seem terribly relevant, if only he could remember how the stories went, or how, exactly, to put on war paint. He still isn't a warrior but now he thinks he might need to be, and how is he supposed to learn these things if he's on the back of a flying bison every day?
Zuko gets his scar (1/2)
Date: 2010-01-08 06:52 am (UTC)Azula was on guard duty, but she wasn't paying much attention. She was watching as Zuko tried to get this right. If he could put out fires- if he could teach Azula to put them out- they'd be a lot safer.
But trying was giving him a headache, so he decided to work on something else for a while. He thought he might be able to make a fireball out of nothing. So he tried that for a while, and then-
“It worked,” he said, letting out a little whoop of excitement. Azula turned to look at him, and her eyes narrowed. (He knew she was going to be better at this than he was by the end of the week, but at the moment he didn't care.)
And then he lost control.
The fire whipped out- not very strongly, but enough to catch on Azula's hair. She was so startled that she knocked over the bucket of water they'd brought out in case of accidents.
Azula's hair shouldn't have been all that hard to put out, but she was panicked, and Zuko had to remind her not to let her panic feed the fire-
And then, father came around the corner, to the smell of burning hair and the sight of Zuko frantically trying to put out Azula's hair by smothering the fire with his jacket.
Zuko didn't notice him there for a moment. But once Azula's hair was out, he looked up.
Father's face was twisted into a snarl.
“What are you doing?” Father said. His voice was ice-cold, and Zuko froze.
Zuko gets his scar (2/2)
Date: 2010-01-08 06:53 am (UTC)“I was-” And then he couldn't think of anything else to say.
In the cleared-out area where they practiced, there were half a dozen half-burned candles surrounded by drips of wax, as well as ashes and bits of burnt wood. They had been burning a lot of little things, these past few weeks. And while they'd been careful at first, lately they hadn't been wary enough to hide the evidence. And Ozai had taken in all of these things with one look, and drawn a conclusion.
“You've been burning things, and your sister is hurt.” Usually, when Ozai made a statement, he had already thought it through. He didn't state evidence. He just stated conclusions: “You're a failure”, or “I am proud.” But there was a puzzled look in his eyes now, one that Zuko had never seen before.
“It was an accident,” Zuko said.
The puzzled look was gone.
“The house- all of the houses- those were your work, too. Your mother insisted that there was no way you could have done it. She'd hidden the matches. But here I see that you've been setting more fires.”
“The house wasn't my fault,” Zuko said. But it was no use. His father wasn't listening to him.
“Your mother died in that fire. What's next? Do you want to kill your sister, too? I see you've made a start on that.”
Azula was turning from her father to her brother, as though she was unsure what to do.
“I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG!” Zuko said, and as though to call him a liar, little curls of smoke came from his hands.
This did not pass unnoticed by his father, who pulled Azula behind him with a look of horror.
“I have to practice so I don't ever lose control of it,” Zuko tried to explain.
“Azula,” his father said, “go in the house.”
Azula hurried off, shooting Zuko a look that he couldn't decipher.
“I saw you make fire with your hands. And they say there are no more spirits in the world anymore.”
“I'm not a spirit.” And now Zuko was just confused.
“Then what are you? A demon? A monster?”
“I'm just me! Just Zuko! Dad-”
-and his father was advancing, and Zuko was more frightened than he had ever been before. Dad didn't lose his temper often, but when he did-
There were candles all around them, and as Zuko backed up he knocked one over. It skidded to the part of the ground they hadn't cleared, just a few feet away, and into a pile of leaves. They'd had a hot, dry summer, and the leaves caught fire quickly. Zuko's panic fed the flames further, and within seconds the blaze was huge.
“You took my wife from me. I won't let you take anything else of mine.”
And his father grabbed a half-burning stick from the edge of the blaze.
It was only a moment later that uncle Iroh turned the corner, followed by Azula. It wasn't soon enough to save Zuko's eye, but it was enough to save his life. And that was the last time Zuko ever saw his father again. From then on, he and Azula lived with Uncle Iroh, and Dad was somewhere else. Where, Zuko never figured out. Uncle would only say: far away.
Ozai
Date: 2010-01-08 07:13 am (UTC)“I know that there are spirits,” he told the wind and the forest and the water around him. “I see that my wife offended them with her false prayers, and cursed my son to punish her. I ask for wisdom, and the power to stop my son before he kills again. I ask that you forgive Ursa's soul so that we may be together in the spirit world some day.”
He'd found flint and other rock. Lighting the incense was difficult, but he managed it.
The air was still. The water lapped gently against the shore of the lake, exactly the same as it had before he asked. The trees did not rustle. There was no sign that his prayer had been answered. Not an outward one. But a sense of conviction settled in him. He was doing the right thing.
He walked deeper into the wilderness, and eventually, after weeks of living on berries and wild game, of washing in rivers, of trying to tease the tangles out of his long hair with his fingers, he arrived at the ocean. And there, he found a gift from Providence.
It was an island, but it was so much more than an island.
The true mind can weather all the lies and illusions without being lost, the lion-turtle says.
I am true, he assures it.
To bend another's energy, it tells him, you must yourself be unbendable. Only the pure soul can touch the poison of hatred without being corrupted.
Oh, don't worry, he told it. I am more than pure enough.
He smiled the smile of a man who had become enlightened, and he went into the world again.
There was much to be done.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 07:20 am (UTC)“We're getting rid of the demon that lives in you.”
“There isn't a demon in me! You're crazy.”
“If there is no demon, you have nothing to fear. If there is, Lord Ozai will rid you of it.”
They started the car, and Toph pounded again. The metal did not give.
“You should stop,” the man in the backseat told her. “Even an 'earthbender' can't bend metal. The spirits have made this clear to us.”
She should never had showed her parents what she could do. She'd just wanted them to know that she could 'see.' That she wasn't helpless. And then they'd locked her in her room.
Pound on the metal, pound on the metal, pound on the metal, and maybe someone would hear her when they stopped at a light. Maybe they'd get her out.
But she didn't think so. She was alone here, and they wanted to take her- what had they called it? Her earthbending. They wanted to take it from her, and that wasn't going to happen.
Pound, pound, pound, pound-
Metal was made from earth, wasn't it?
-pound.
Well, maybe there was a little earth in it, still.
POUND.
They stopped at a light.
Couldn't bend metal, huh? That sounded like a challenge.
When they moved on, there was a hole in the side of the trunk, and they were short one passenger.
She couldn't go home. She was a tiny blind eleven-year-old girl, and someone was going to wonder what she was doing alone. Where could she go where she would be unnoticed?
She didn't know. So she wandered a bit.
Someone followed her. His footsteps were light but sure, and they were gaining on her. She turned corners and crossed streets, and still he followed.
“You look lost,” he said- he spoke slightly strangely, and she was positive he had something in his mouth. A cigarette, maybe? But there was no stench of tobacco.
“Yeah?” she said. She let her feet and hands move into a stance. He made a move, he'd be flying twenty feet into the air before he knew what hit him.
“Whoa,” he said, a laugh in his voice. “Take it easy. I don't wanna hurt you. I saw what you did to that car. You're stronger than you look, aren't you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I am. What do you want?”
“We could use someone like you,” he said. “In my gang.” His voice was steady and his heartbeat was, too, so Toph figured he was sincere.
And there was Toph's answer. There was where she could fit in.
“Wanna join my freedom fighters?” he asked.
Toph said yes.
Katara and Sokka find Aang
Date: 2010-01-15 06:28 am (UTC)They went to the south pole one summer, when Katara was fourteen and Sokka was fifteen.
“This is where we lived when I was young,” he said, with a note of sadness in his voice.
There was snow, and water, and ice. Sokka looked bored, and Katara knew he'd rather be at home, on his computer. But Katara-
She could feel something lapping at the edges of her mind, like the sea, pulling in and then retreating. There was a full moon in the sky as well as a sun near the horizon, and the snow and ice and perpetual sunshine had a beauty that Gran-Gran's pictures had never quite captured.
Later she could remember every detail with startling clarity. How they tried to explore the ice fields one day, and there was something that felt strange, just below the ice. And it was pulling at her, the way the moon did or the water did.
“You're so weird,” Sokka said, and hunched into his coat farther. “Can we go now?”
“There's something here.”
“How can you tell? Is your waterbending telling you?”
Katara hated it when he was sarcastic.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it IS telling me! Just because you don't believe in it-”
And as she gestured with her hands, something went crack in the ice, and a fissure separated the two of them.
Then, a beam of light shot into the air.
She wasn't sure what possessed her, to lean right over the edge and look into the light. She could have fallen. She could have been hurt by whatever was there. But she didn't, and she wasn't.
“There's a boy down there,” she said, once the lights faded enough to see again. “I have to make sure he's okay.” And she wedged her way down into the crack.
“Stop! Katara! You're going to get stuck down there!”
She shot him a glare as she went down. Her brother could be such a wuss.
Near the bottom, there was a sort of cave carved out of the ice. At the center was the boy she had seen. Next to him was some sort of huge creature. Both of them were sleeping, and the boy was strange clothes that were not warm enough for this weather. Or any weather, at the south pole.
There was a moment when she thought he was dead- but he was breathing, even if the breaths were slow and shallow.
She couldn't give him her parka. She wouldn't be able to help him if she was frozen to death herself. Even in the summer, the pole was just too cold.
She had trouble waking him. His eyes fluttered a few times, and shook him- they had to get him somewhere warm-
(She took off a glove and grabbed one of his hands, to give him as much warmth as she could without freezing to death- but he was warm, and that didn't make any sense at all)
“Where am I?” The boy asked, when he was finally awake enough to speak. He blinked a few times, and rubbed his eyes. Then he stood up- and the way he moved was weird, as if he'd heard of gravity but didn't quite grasp the concept.
“You're at the south pole,” Katara told him, trying to ignore the weird things until she'd made sure he was okay. “How are you not frozen? How long have you been down here?”
He might have answered, but then he was distracted by a sneeze that threw him up into the air near the top of the little ice cave they were in.
“You're an airbender!” she said, and she almost clapped in delight, worry forgotten.
“Sure am!” he said.
Then he tried to wake up the huge furry beast, which was apparently named Appa.
“Are you okay down there?” Sokka called.
“We're fine! But you might want to get away from the hole!”
And then they burst from the crevice on the back of a ten-ton monster, and the sound of Sokka's alarmed yelling mixed with Katara and Aang's gleeful laughter as they soared into the air.
Sokka spars with Suki
Date: 2010-01-15 06:53 am (UTC)“There's supposed to be a lot of magic in the world,” she told him as he tried to duck a fan-blade and ended up with an impromptu haircut. “It's gone now, but it'll come back. You have the Avatar, after all. It's only a matter of time before the spirits return. When they do, we'll be ready.”
“You guys know about the Avatar?” He swung at her clumsily with his club, and she sidestepped him easily.
“Our nation was founded by one of the previous Avatars.” She hit his arm with the flat of her fan, knocking his weapon from his grasp.
“Your nation? There aren't any nations any more. It's just the world.”
“Kyoshi island has always been its own land. In spirit if not in name.”
She knocked his feet out from under him, and with that warpaint on she looked fierce in a way he hadn't seen anyone look before. Like she was ready to go off to war and use those fans in an actual fight.
That was what a real warrior looked like.
He felt his face get hot.
“So- good fight,” he said, standing up. “I- it's lunch time. Do you want to go eat something? At a restaurant?”
She gave him a look. “Are you asking me out on a date?”
He opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again. “Yes?”
She raised an eyebrow, and he prepared to be shut down.
“Okay.”
Again with the mouth open, mouth closed. He was beginning to feel like a fish.
“Really?”
“But I get to kick your butt again once we're done eating.”
That sounded fun. Clearly he was losing his mind.
“And you're paying,” she added.
The world
Date: 2010-01-15 06:58 am (UTC)“I mean, there are legends of them. But these days, it's just... the world. So you're an airbender? I've never met anyone else who believed in bending, let alone someone who could actually do it.”
“It's a myth!” Sokka interrupted. “I'm sure there's a logical explanation for all of this!”
But he was staring open-mouthed at the air bison, so Katara was reasonably sure that he'd stop being stupid soon.
“How long was I in that iceberg? There were benders all over the place before.”
“Most people think it's a myth, now, if they've heard of it at all. I almost didn't know any better, myself. But...”
She took off her gloves, and moved her hands carefully, and bent a little of the ice into water, floating it between her hands.
“You're a waterbender!”
“The only one, as far as I know.”
Aang suddenly looked very sad. “We have to fix this.”
Longshot steals books from the library
Date: 2010-01-15 04:31 pm (UTC)Toph didn't care about the books in the library much, but she liked the smell of the place. It was clean. Not like the hideout. (She loves the hideout, but the smell could be better) She liked that it was a safe place- the gangs didn't come here, much.
She liked the running water in the bathroom, too, because she was sick of the sugary pop that the others keep bringing back to the base and clean water was hard to find when you were squatting in an abandoned building.
And as far as she could tell, getting books made Longshot happy, which made Smellerbee happy. And when their band of freedom fighters was happy, Jet was sort of happy, and he didn't try to do impossible things that might get them all killed.
Once, a couple of months after Toph had first joined the gang, the head librarian tried to talk to her. This was before Toph had realized that the librarians didn't mind Longshot taking the books, and she'd tensed up to fight-
“You're new,” the librarian had said gently.
“Yeah,” Toph said.
“Do you have somewhere else to go? Family I could call?”
“I have family,” Toph said, eyes narrowing. “They're right over there.”
She pointed towards where she could feel Longshot standing.
And the librarian had murmured apologies and backed off, and Toph had systematically ripped up her clothes that night.
“What are you doing?” Smellerbee said.
“The clothes are too nice. I don't want to look like I'm a rich kid. I stand out too much.”
And that was the last time the librarians ever talked to any of them.
Sometimes, when they got back to the hideout, Smellerbee would read the books out loud, and Toph would pretend she wasn't listening.
“And then the monk saw that the beautiful woman had a tail- she wasn't a woman at all. She was a kitsune, come to trick him...”
Smellerbee's voice was toneless as she read, and she didn't even try to give the characters different voices, but Toph didn't really care.
She'd never had anyone read stories to her before. Not at home.
She shook her head. No- that place hadn't been home.
Curled up under a couple of dirty blankets, in an abandoned building with no heat, with Smellerbee reading stories to Longshot but really to her- this was what home felt like.
Toph and Smellerbee talk
Date: 2010-01-15 04:39 pm (UTC)“How do you do it?” Smellerbee asked. “Aren't you blind?”
“I have better hearing than most people,” Toph said, which was true.
The city was made of concrete, and that was earth. It was a city that was completely visible to her, even more than home. The buildings had their roots in granite, and they stretched up and up, fingers of stone clawing at the sky. Tunnels carried water and gas and through the city, and other tunnels had underground roads, some forgotten and some still in use. Toph could 'see' all of it, though there was so much to 'see' that she sometimes was a little overwhelmed.
“It's more than just hearing,” Smellerbee said. They were in their base- a building they squatted in, deep in the bad part of town. Toph and Smellerbee shared a room on the third floor. There had been structural problems in the building before Toph got there, but buildings were made of concrete and metal, and the cracks in the walls had disappeared one by one over the weeks since she'd joined.
Toph did not reply to Smellerbee.
“It's magic, isn't it? It's a gift from the spirits.”
“I just hear well,” Toph said, remembering exactly what had happened the last time she explained bending to someone. She turned away from Smellerbee's side of the room and pretended to sleep.
Aangst
Date: 2010-01-16 08:47 am (UTC)And then he saw the place the southern air temple had once been.
It was still there. No one had touched it since he left. At least, that was what it looked like. The temples were still in place. But the rain and wind and years had smoothed out all the corners and collapsed most of the buildings.
“Aang-” Katara said, as he looked around.
“They're all dead,” he said. And he sat down, right where he was standing. “They're really dead. They've been dead for thousands of years.”
He felt like something inside of him was cracking, and he let it.
He didn't remember much after that.
Then Katara put her arms around him, and he could breathe again. What had been left of the temple was gone.
“It's okay,” she told him. “It's okay, you're okay- we're your family now.”
For now, that was enough. It had to be.
In which Katara is kind of a televangelist
Date: 2010-01-20 01:34 am (UTC)“You wouldn't believe me if I told you,” Zuko said, collapsing into a chair and piling rice onto his plate.
Azula turned the TV on across the room, and was flipping through when Zuko said: “Wait. Go back a channel.”
She shot him an annoyed look, but did.
“...too long without hope. But the Avatar is back, and we've seen spirits with our own eyes. We've been to the South Pole, and there are still...”
It was a girl in a blue dress, standing next to the weird tattooed kid Zuko had seen earlier, and she was giving an interview to an amused-looking reporter.
“But- what exactly is an Avatar?”
“The Avatar is the bridge between our world and the spirit world,” the girl said, giving the camera a bright smile. She gestured to the kid beside her. “Aang is the Avatar.”
The kid grinned sheepishly.
Uncle was looking at the television very closely.
“Aang,” the girl said- quietly, but still audibly. “Show them some airbending.”
Aang stood up straight. “Right,” he said, grinning. And he thumped his staff against the ground, which made a pair of orange wings pop out of it.
“Watch this,” he said.
There was a moment when the camera jerked around, and Zuko couldn't see what was happening, but then-
The kid was flying. Actually flying, like he was some kind of weird orange and yellow bird.
“Interesting,” Azula said, eyes slightly narrowed.
Zuko knew that look. He'd been on the wrong end of it more times than he could count, and it always ended up the same way.
That Avatar kid was toast.
Re: In which Katara is kind of a televangelist
Date: 2010-02-06 11:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-24 07:21 am (UTC)Of course, it was the things you didn't worry about that came back to bite you. So when a couple more crazy guys come to take her away- these ones shooting fire and lead at her- she was totally unprepared. Luckily, so were they.
They were expecting an earthbender. But they weren't expecting Toph.
Jet was burned a little, and he'd started in on his usual speech about oppression and how they had to fight back, only this time the subject was firebenders instead of all the gangs around.
Toph was going to have to leave. If they'd come after her once, they'd do it again.
Just... not tonight, she told herself. I'll wait a day or two. They won't come again right away. It'll be safe for another day.
She didn't tell herself: There isn't anywhere to go. Because it didn't need saying. It was just a fact, same as hunger and bullets and warm summer nights.
And then a day turned into a week turned into a month, and they were fighting for their lives yet again.
Aang came, then, and offered his help, and asked Toph to come with him to teach him earthbending.
“It'll be safer for you if I'm gone,” she told Smellerbee and Longshot and the rest of the gang. “When all of this is done, I'll come back.”
“Don't come back if you find a safer place,” Longshot told her. “No one will blame you.”
“I'm coming back,” Toph said, because this city and these people were hers and she's wasn't going to leave them forever just because some idiots wanted to set her on fire.
Aang goes to school
Date: 2010-01-25 12:07 am (UTC)And someone had to complain to the teachers when the other twelve-year-olds teased Aang about his tattoos or his strange calligraphy. Aang tried to smile and charm his way through everything when sometimes you had to bash heads together.
He just wished that he wasn't the one who had to bring Aang his lunch. Seriously, if the kid was any more spastic, he'd forget his own head. But Gran-Gran was out of town and Sokka was taking some of his classes at the local college this year, so he was passing by the middle school anyway.
“You haven't heard about the Ba Sing Se Revolution?” Aang's teacher asked as Sokka walked in, eye twitching slightly. “Were you raised by zebra wolves?”
“Yeah,” Aang said with a bright smile. “How did you guess?!”
The teacher was rendered speechless, and the class laughed, and Aang looked almost proud of himself.
That's when Sokka decided that another part of being a big brother involved sitting on Aang until he actually did his homework.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 04:30 am (UTC)He tried not to worry too much about Zuko. The boy was hurt, both in body and soul, but he had a good heart, and he was slowly recovering from all the damage his father had done to him.
But Azula- he wasn't sure what to do with her.
There were days when she was sweet and lovely. She smiled at people. She gave them gifts- cards, or cookies, or a hug and a few kind words. She seemed like a normal seven-year-old.
Other days, she was not as in control. She was, after all, a very young child, and she let the mask slip sometimes. (Even on the good days, there was something a little bit strange about her. The way her dolls kept disappearing, to be found, later, disfigured or damaged. The way her eyes narrowed, a little too gleeful, when someone else was in pain.)
Iroh had been much older than Ozai, but he had been home often enough to see his brother grow up. He knew what was happening. He knew what a child with no sense of empathy acted like.
He found the word sociopath, and he knew that it fit her.
You've been dealt a poor hand, Azula, he thought. Everyone else has is born with a sense of warmth- of humanity. And whether you never had it or it was snuffed out too soon to bloom, you are broken now- and there is probably nothing I can do to fix you.
There were two choices before him.
Azula and Zuko were close in age. It was likely that she would be very cruel to him- maybe even violent. As she was the better bender of the two, Zuko could be hurt.
He could focus his efforts on protecting Zuko. He could let Azula follow the path she was on, and end up as a poisonous flower, charming and lovely until the moment she wasn't.
The part of him that had once been a general knew that the smart plan was to cut his losses. To abandon hopeless projects and focus his forces on targets he could defeat.
The part of him that had been a father, and was now a father again, said: I will not give up on her.
You are missing a part of yourself, he thought to her quietly. But maybe I can help you build a substitute, out of logic instead of intuition, out of thought instead of feeling.
It was probably hopeless. But Iroh could not admit defeat. He could not lose another child.
Right now you wear a mask to manipulate me. But wear a mask long enough, and maybe it can become your face.
Waterbending
Date: 2010-01-25 04:50 am (UTC)That was what learning waterbending was like. She'd been muddling through, trying to figure out what motions did what and how it all fit together, and suddenly there was someone to teach her, and she felt like she was waking up.
“You're progressing very quickly,” Pakku told her, with an annoyed look at Aang, who was making a snowman. “Soon we'll have to call you Master Katara.”
Didn't Aang feel it, too? Or was it not the same, if you already knew an element? Katara would never goof off during training. She couldn't, not when there was so much to learn. Not when they had a mission. Not when every wave and dagger of ice felt like something she was born to do, something perfect and right and as much a part of her as her heartbeat or her breath.
Aang was the Avatar. He ought to understand these things.
(Later she caught sight of him soaring through the sky with a big grin on his face and remembered that he did)
no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 05:22 am (UTC)Her face was twisted in rage. Her hair had half-fallen from its usual tidy topknot, and she looked ready to bend flames at him.
“I have never thought that about you, Azula. I love you more than you can know,” he told her. But he didn't dare approach her to hug her or offer assurance. (Azula didn't understand that you could love someone and know that they were dangerous at the same time)
If anything, his words made her even more angry.
“Don't try to find me,” she said. “You won't be able to.”
The door slammed as she left, and the sound was a victory. Azula was not the daughter Ozai had left here. She cared that she was loved, even if she couldn't tell true love from false. The pieces had been put back together a little strangely, but they were all there. She was whole. He'd done what he set out to do, all those years ago.
That couldn't stop his heart from breaking as the cab drove away.