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(Avatar) in-progress fic-thinger?
so. i'm weak.
Also. Zuko.
The shack was in a deplorable state, and cramped. His uncle's bulk really didn't help with that. If Zuko had had any choice, he would have been anywhere but there, in that tiny, wobbly hut that masqueraded as an actual house, amongst three generations of a family that didn't seem to hold washing in high regard.
He didn't have a choice.
The Earth Kingdom city was crawling with Fire Nation soldiers. Escaping wasn't an option at the moment. The only place where no one would report them on sight was the slums. The math was easy to do; it didn't mean that Zuko was all that happy about sleeping on a packed earth floor, along with three of the family's brats, kicked out of their bed by his uncle Iroh.
Uncle Iroh really, really should have lost some weight in the last two years; they ran all the time, fought for their lives more often than not, and food didn't really fall from the sky. Somehow, he still barely fit on the bed which normally housed three kids ranging from toddler to preteen.
Zuko stared at the ceiling through the darkness, trying, in vain, to ignore the snoring of the matriarch of the family, the sleepy mumbles of the eight-year-old girl who had curled up on the floor at his side, the distinctive odor of cabbage, sweat and smoke, and the tiny, tiny rock just under the small of his back that he couldn't seem to find with his hand, but that his ass found just fine.
The family was composed of a forty-something hard-working couple -- who almost never looked up for fear of letting people notice their Air-Nomad-hazel eyes -- their twenty-year old daughter and her vulgar thief of a husband, their thirteen-year-old absolute brat of a son, another nine-year-old daughter who was currently butting her head into his side -- she hadn't left his side one second since the instant he had walked inside the shack -- and the eldest daughter's two-year-old baby boy.
If Zuko's calculations were exact, he had been born a month at the most after the day Zuko had seen that ray of light in the sky. A month after the return of the Avatar into the world.
When Zuko had lit the stove with a puff of fire, the smoke had swirled away from the child like a pack of tiny dust devils.
Zuko wondered how many of the scattered Air Nomads still knew how to read the signs of a Bending ability in a toddler; how many were going to be betrayed by their own children. In the Fire Nation, it was "common knowledge" that the Air Nomads had been annihilated; but it wasn't such a big surprise that there had been survivors. They were called nomads for a reason; they had been all over the place, hard to pin down. For a few years after the destruction of their temples, they had been hunted down, even after all the Airbenders amongst them were dead and buried; and then it had been noticed that the only Bending children born of Air ancestry were those few who were bastards of another Element -- and they never expressed Air.
As if, when the Avatar had been frozen, he had frozen his entire birth element along with his body.
But now the cycle had started again.
Zuko vaguely wondered what the next Avatar would be like; if he was even born already.
Also. Zuko.
The shack was in a deplorable state, and cramped. His uncle's bulk really didn't help with that. If Zuko had had any choice, he would have been anywhere but there, in that tiny, wobbly hut that masqueraded as an actual house, amongst three generations of a family that didn't seem to hold washing in high regard.
He didn't have a choice.
The Earth Kingdom city was crawling with Fire Nation soldiers. Escaping wasn't an option at the moment. The only place where no one would report them on sight was the slums. The math was easy to do; it didn't mean that Zuko was all that happy about sleeping on a packed earth floor, along with three of the family's brats, kicked out of their bed by his uncle Iroh.
Uncle Iroh really, really should have lost some weight in the last two years; they ran all the time, fought for their lives more often than not, and food didn't really fall from the sky. Somehow, he still barely fit on the bed which normally housed three kids ranging from toddler to preteen.
Zuko stared at the ceiling through the darkness, trying, in vain, to ignore the snoring of the matriarch of the family, the sleepy mumbles of the eight-year-old girl who had curled up on the floor at his side, the distinctive odor of cabbage, sweat and smoke, and the tiny, tiny rock just under the small of his back that he couldn't seem to find with his hand, but that his ass found just fine.
The family was composed of a forty-something hard-working couple -- who almost never looked up for fear of letting people notice their Air-Nomad-hazel eyes -- their twenty-year old daughter and her vulgar thief of a husband, their thirteen-year-old absolute brat of a son, another nine-year-old daughter who was currently butting her head into his side -- she hadn't left his side one second since the instant he had walked inside the shack -- and the eldest daughter's two-year-old baby boy.
If Zuko's calculations were exact, he had been born a month at the most after the day Zuko had seen that ray of light in the sky. A month after the return of the Avatar into the world.
When Zuko had lit the stove with a puff of fire, the smoke had swirled away from the child like a pack of tiny dust devils.
Zuko wondered how many of the scattered Air Nomads still knew how to read the signs of a Bending ability in a toddler; how many were going to be betrayed by their own children. In the Fire Nation, it was "common knowledge" that the Air Nomads had been annihilated; but it wasn't such a big surprise that there had been survivors. They were called nomads for a reason; they had been all over the place, hard to pin down. For a few years after the destruction of their temples, they had been hunted down, even after all the Airbenders amongst them were dead and buried; and then it had been noticed that the only Bending children born of Air ancestry were those few who were bastards of another Element -- and they never expressed Air.
As if, when the Avatar had been frozen, he had frozen his entire birth element along with his body.
But now the cycle had started again.
Zuko vaguely wondered what the next Avatar would be like; if he was even born already.