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(Avatar) post-evil, title-less fic-thing.
Yep, ficcage for Avatar : the last Airbender. Which can be a little childish, but has amazing characters and worldbuilding and OMG THE FIGHTING STYLES.
... I need a Zuko icon.
I posted the start of this before, but i'm reposting it. Still not sure where I'm going with this fic, but hey, it's written more for fun than with any goal in mind. XD (and, uh, I feel this horrible temptation to turn it into a Sokka/Zuko/Katara threesome of sorts. Because, dude, that would be hot, and also, in this context, pure evil and certainly not romantic at all. Mm, despair and grittiness. But the het fans will kill me for the yaoi, the yaoi fans will kill me for the het, and almost everyone will kill me for the incest. After they all kill me for, you know, killing Aang. u.u;)
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 three-year-old baby boy.
If Zuko's calculations were exact, he had been born ten months at the most after the day Zuko had seen that ray of light in the cold sky of the Southern pole. Ten months after the return of the Avatar into the world.
When Zuko had lit the stove with a puff of fire earlier in the afternoon, 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 Bender 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 or she was even born already.
Not that he cared; not that he had any reason to think about that kid, except for the fact that he couldn't sleep. He sat up, glancing quickly at his uncle -- the old man still looked asleep, but by now Zuko knew that appearances never did mean much for Iroh.
"Uncle," he breathed, just in case, not leaning too close. "I'm getting some fresh air."
The air outside wasn't fresh. It smelled like the slums; somewhere people didn't have neat stables for their animals, where no one was paid to clean up the streets. One of the barracks was still smoking; it had hosted the family of a young Earthbender who had made an attempt on the life of a Firebender commander. Zuko slipped between the blackened walls in silence; he didn't want to cause unnecessary trouble by getting caught loitering in the middle of the night by a patrol.
He would be eighteen in a week, give or take a few days; he wasn't sure of the date anymore. He had outgrown his old armor; and his hair was long enough to tie in a high ponytail once again. He never did.
He had been on the run for two years now. Exiled at fourteen, declared traitor and stripped of his rightful title at sixteen, orphaned only a few months ago... and now his sister was on the throne, and she was worse, so much worse.
He was so stupid to miss his father, so ridiculous to keep wishing he could have talked to the man before he died. Before the Avatar died.
Ozai wouldn't have forgiven him, ever. Because he didn't love his son enough to forget his faults, and nothing Zuko did would ever have been enough.
Aang would have loved him as a brother if only he had accepted his freely offered friendship. And now, Zuko couldn't forgive the Avatar for killing his father, even if the death of the Fire Lord had been the only way to stop the comet.
It hadn't stopped the conquests; Azula was more vicious and pitiless than Ozai had ever been.
Zuko unclenched his fists, and forced himself to blow the air he'd been holding in his lungs between his hands, slowly, hiding the glow of the flames. He didn't want to set the house on fire again, even though it was already ruined beyond repair. It would attract too much attention.
Something chirruped softly overhead, and he jerked, looking around wildly. He'd heard the sound enough to recognize it, and there were no lemurs in this part of the Earth Kingdom.
"Figures you'd be lurking in a scorched ruin."
The gust of flame left his fist even before the tribesman stopped talking. Zuko was flowing from his first stance to the next instinctively, teeth clenched; but then she came out of the shadows on his side, ice-edged water curling around her threateningly.
"Don't."
"Yeah, what she said." Her brother peeked through the hole in the wall, and showed Zuko his empty hands, waving them mockingly. "We're not here to ambush you."
Sokka leaped over the crumbling wall, skidding inelegantly on the loose stones inside, and then circled the room, giving Zuko a wide berth. He leaned against the wall beside his sister, arms crossed in a falsely nonchalant way. Zuko lowered his fists slowly; if they weren't trying to trap him between the two of them, they were probably telling the truth. He gave the girl a narrow-eyed glare anyway; the whip of ice was still curling lazily around her legs like the tail of a cat.
"What are you doing here?" he rasped out, off balance. He hadn't seen them since the comet. Hadn't really cared, to be frank.
"What are YOU doing here?" Sokka countered, rolling his eyes.
"Do we have to resort to a childish game of 'I was here first', or do I have to choke it out of you? Just answer the question."
Katara's eyes chilled over and her whip lashed at his head; he felt it cut a few strands of hair as he dropped to the floor and rolled.
"Stopstopstop! Katara, calm down -- hey, relax, okay? Everyone relax. Man, come on, we can't have a fight here -- soldiers, remember? Military state? Wanted fugitives? Bad idea, seriously, everyone calm down..."
Zuko didn't know how he had managed not to counterattack immediately; maybe the surprise at seeing that useless idiot get right in between two high-level benders about to massacre each other.
"Sokka--"
"No. I'm sorry Katara, but no. If you attack him now he's gonna do his fire stuff and in case you forgot, it's the middle of the night; they're not going to miss that. Besides we already knew he was an irritating, stuck-up, aggressive jerk, right? So why are you expecting him not to be?"
She relaxed finally, the water retracting inside her gourd, and a small smile flitted over her face. "Right."
"Right, so I'm gonna do the talking, okay? Better at diplomacy."
Zuko snorted. "Mighty fine diplomat indeed. You do know I could hear you."
Sokka made a face at him. Half a year ago, Zuko would have been offended enough to attack; now he just arched an eyebrow with all the contempt and superiority he could hold, and waited.
"... Okay. So. We weren't really here for you; we're just going through, but we heard you were around and--"
"Heard from who?" he snapped back, alarmed.
"Resistance."
"Sokka!"
"Katara, we talked about it. I don't trust him any farther than I can throw him, but--"
"And what if he wants to buy his way back into his sister's good --"
"Don't," Zuko breathed, "finish this sentence."
Katara stared at him, wary and contemptuous. He sneered back, not looking down. Bitch.
"...Fine." She turned away with a huff, crossing her arms. Zuko pretended not to notice the curl of smoke rising over his shoulders.
"Okay, okay. So you don't like us, we don't like you... But."
"I'm not on your side."
Sokka made a sound halfway between a growl and a whine and tugged on his own hair, glaring at the roof. Zuko snorted.
"I have no patience for your theatrics. Get it over with. What are you doing here?"
"Pure courtesy," Katara snapped, giving him a look full of distaste.
"Yeah, so, as I said, we were traveling, kinda paused to see you and your uncle -- where is he?"
"Around," Zuko grunted; he wasn't about to tell them anything. "Why did you want to talk to me?"
Sokka grimaced again, as if his patience was being sorely tested. "Well, see, we have this plan--"
"We're going to kill your sister," Katara cut him, and then added, like an afterthought, "Do you mind?"
Zuko could only stare at her, speechless.
+
Oh! And![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theninjakitty has just posted a thingamajig we wrote together. It has my Teamwork!Sasuke and her SelfReliance!Sasuke, alone in a small room. :3 Mmm, crack.
... I need a Zuko icon.
I posted the start of this before, but i'm reposting it. Still not sure where I'm going with this fic, but hey, it's written more for fun than with any goal in mind. XD (and, uh, I feel this horrible temptation to turn it into a Sokka/Zuko/Katara threesome of sorts. Because, dude, that would be hot, and also, in this context, pure evil and certainly not romantic at all. Mm, despair and grittiness. But the het fans will kill me for the yaoi, the yaoi fans will kill me for the het, and almost everyone will kill me for the incest. After they all kill me for, you know, killing Aang. u.u;)
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 three-year-old baby boy.
If Zuko's calculations were exact, he had been born ten months at the most after the day Zuko had seen that ray of light in the cold sky of the Southern pole. Ten months after the return of the Avatar into the world.
When Zuko had lit the stove with a puff of fire earlier in the afternoon, 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 Bender 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 or she was even born already.
Not that he cared; not that he had any reason to think about that kid, except for the fact that he couldn't sleep. He sat up, glancing quickly at his uncle -- the old man still looked asleep, but by now Zuko knew that appearances never did mean much for Iroh.
"Uncle," he breathed, just in case, not leaning too close. "I'm getting some fresh air."
The air outside wasn't fresh. It smelled like the slums; somewhere people didn't have neat stables for their animals, where no one was paid to clean up the streets. One of the barracks was still smoking; it had hosted the family of a young Earthbender who had made an attempt on the life of a Firebender commander. Zuko slipped between the blackened walls in silence; he didn't want to cause unnecessary trouble by getting caught loitering in the middle of the night by a patrol.
He would be eighteen in a week, give or take a few days; he wasn't sure of the date anymore. He had outgrown his old armor; and his hair was long enough to tie in a high ponytail once again. He never did.
He had been on the run for two years now. Exiled at fourteen, declared traitor and stripped of his rightful title at sixteen, orphaned only a few months ago... and now his sister was on the throne, and she was worse, so much worse.
He was so stupid to miss his father, so ridiculous to keep wishing he could have talked to the man before he died. Before the Avatar died.
Ozai wouldn't have forgiven him, ever. Because he didn't love his son enough to forget his faults, and nothing Zuko did would ever have been enough.
Aang would have loved him as a brother if only he had accepted his freely offered friendship. And now, Zuko couldn't forgive the Avatar for killing his father, even if the death of the Fire Lord had been the only way to stop the comet.
It hadn't stopped the conquests; Azula was more vicious and pitiless than Ozai had ever been.
Zuko unclenched his fists, and forced himself to blow the air he'd been holding in his lungs between his hands, slowly, hiding the glow of the flames. He didn't want to set the house on fire again, even though it was already ruined beyond repair. It would attract too much attention.
Something chirruped softly overhead, and he jerked, looking around wildly. He'd heard the sound enough to recognize it, and there were no lemurs in this part of the Earth Kingdom.
"Figures you'd be lurking in a scorched ruin."
The gust of flame left his fist even before the tribesman stopped talking. Zuko was flowing from his first stance to the next instinctively, teeth clenched; but then she came out of the shadows on his side, ice-edged water curling around her threateningly.
"Don't."
"Yeah, what she said." Her brother peeked through the hole in the wall, and showed Zuko his empty hands, waving them mockingly. "We're not here to ambush you."
Sokka leaped over the crumbling wall, skidding inelegantly on the loose stones inside, and then circled the room, giving Zuko a wide berth. He leaned against the wall beside his sister, arms crossed in a falsely nonchalant way. Zuko lowered his fists slowly; if they weren't trying to trap him between the two of them, they were probably telling the truth. He gave the girl a narrow-eyed glare anyway; the whip of ice was still curling lazily around her legs like the tail of a cat.
"What are you doing here?" he rasped out, off balance. He hadn't seen them since the comet. Hadn't really cared, to be frank.
"What are YOU doing here?" Sokka countered, rolling his eyes.
"Do we have to resort to a childish game of 'I was here first', or do I have to choke it out of you? Just answer the question."
Katara's eyes chilled over and her whip lashed at his head; he felt it cut a few strands of hair as he dropped to the floor and rolled.
"Stopstopstop! Katara, calm down -- hey, relax, okay? Everyone relax. Man, come on, we can't have a fight here -- soldiers, remember? Military state? Wanted fugitives? Bad idea, seriously, everyone calm down..."
Zuko didn't know how he had managed not to counterattack immediately; maybe the surprise at seeing that useless idiot get right in between two high-level benders about to massacre each other.
"Sokka--"
"No. I'm sorry Katara, but no. If you attack him now he's gonna do his fire stuff and in case you forgot, it's the middle of the night; they're not going to miss that. Besides we already knew he was an irritating, stuck-up, aggressive jerk, right? So why are you expecting him not to be?"
She relaxed finally, the water retracting inside her gourd, and a small smile flitted over her face. "Right."
"Right, so I'm gonna do the talking, okay? Better at diplomacy."
Zuko snorted. "Mighty fine diplomat indeed. You do know I could hear you."
Sokka made a face at him. Half a year ago, Zuko would have been offended enough to attack; now he just arched an eyebrow with all the contempt and superiority he could hold, and waited.
"... Okay. So. We weren't really here for you; we're just going through, but we heard you were around and--"
"Heard from who?" he snapped back, alarmed.
"Resistance."
"Sokka!"
"Katara, we talked about it. I don't trust him any farther than I can throw him, but--"
"And what if he wants to buy his way back into his sister's good --"
"Don't," Zuko breathed, "finish this sentence."
Katara stared at him, wary and contemptuous. He sneered back, not looking down. Bitch.
"...Fine." She turned away with a huff, crossing her arms. Zuko pretended not to notice the curl of smoke rising over his shoulders.
"Okay, okay. So you don't like us, we don't like you... But."
"I'm not on your side."
Sokka made a sound halfway between a growl and a whine and tugged on his own hair, glaring at the roof. Zuko snorted.
"I have no patience for your theatrics. Get it over with. What are you doing here?"
"Pure courtesy," Katara snapped, giving him a look full of distaste.
"Yeah, so, as I said, we were traveling, kinda paused to see you and your uncle -- where is he?"
"Around," Zuko grunted; he wasn't about to tell them anything. "Why did you want to talk to me?"
Sokka grimaced again, as if his patience was being sorely tested. "Well, see, we have this plan--"
"We're going to kill your sister," Katara cut him, and then added, like an afterthought, "Do you mind?"
Zuko could only stare at her, speechless.
+
Oh! And
theninjakitty has just posted a thingamajig we wrote together. It has my Teamwork!Sasuke and her SelfReliance!Sasuke, alone in a small room. :3 Mmm, crack.
no subject
though it would make me happy. It's good to know that people read it ^^Avatar is surprisingly good for a nickelodeon show. o.o 'course it's childish sometimes, but hey, it's aimed at kids 8 to 12 originally.