And now for something completely different

[resonance_and_d]

So 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.

Comments

Daddy's little sociopath

[resonance-and-d.livejournal.com]

Azula had been angry with her mother. She was always angry with her, these days, because Ursa did not seem to understand anything at all. She was always telling Azula to be more kind, more gentle, and Azula didn't know how, and she didn't want to, and her mom kept crying and calling her maladjusted and cold whenever she though Azula couldn't hear. Azula was five but she wasn't stupid. She knew what all of that meant.

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.)