#Sokka you're their superior officer call them off
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tags by @wileycap absolutely passing peer review:
#sokka would be beyond thrilled to find the Men he Trained and Drilled holding the fire prince captive #"come on sokka the five-year-olds aren't actually keeping him here he just had nowhere else to go" #sokka: "oh yeah? check this out: MEN SEIZE THE PRISONER!" #(in the background Zuko is slowly but surely buried by an avalanche of toddlers) #(he doesn't seem that mad about it but to sokka it's the principle that counts) #i love this so much #LOVE THIS #absolutely genius op
Hi ! prompt idea : What if Zuko was armed during the first episode and was stranded with the water tribe while the avatar left with Katara and Sokka, Iroh on his trail for white lotus reasons.
Oh we are going to have us some FUN with "stranded with the water tribe", say no more.
---
Zuko was dripping, and steaming, and staring down two dozen women and their gaggle of small children, plus that old not-the-Avatar crone from earlier. They were all cowering away from him. Which was--
Good. It was good. If they were cowering, then they hadn’t noticed how steam was not flames. He wasn’t sure he could make flames, not after the arctic water he’d landed in, with that last sight of the Avatar glowing; not after surfacing under the ice pack, after swimming, after kicking slamming breaking through and his ship was gone and there was only ocean all around and
and he’d made it back to this pathetic little camp of the Southern Water Tribe, because that was the only place he knew for sure would have shelter, and he wasn’t going to die just because they were all staring at him, even if felt like he would.
Even if the old not-the-Avatar woman could probably take him, right now. But she didn’t know that.
Zuko pulled himself up, taller than her by at least a few inches, and blew steam from his nose.
“I am commandeering one of your huts,” he said. And added, because Uncle said even a prince should be gracious: “You may choose which one.”
---
She choose her own.
...The only one without children that flames might scar, or younger women to catch a soldier’s interests.
Zuko sat by her fire and determinedly started struggling out of his wet clothes and she was still in here with him--
Zuko pulled one of her animal pelts over himself, and finished fighting off his clothes. When he stuck his head back out, cheeks still reddened from what was obviously the cold, she dropped a parka on his head.
“Dry clothes, Your Highness,” she said.
The parka was much bigger than he was. He fell asleep hoping that the camp’s men were on a long, long hunting trip.
---
He woke up again. Kanna tucked her favorite ulu knife away, newly sharpened, and stopped contemplating the alternative.
---
“I am commandeering a ship,” he said.
The crone led him across the village, all twenty paces of it, to a row of canoes.
“Take whichever one you want,” she said. “Will you need help getting it to the water?”
Zuko looked at the canoes. Looked at the ocean. Watched a leopard seal, easily the size of the largest canoe, dozing just past the ice his own ship had broken through the day before. It was frozen again, a great icy arrow pointing from the waves to the village, snow already starting to cover it over.
Beyond was blue sky and gray ocean and white ice, floating in blocks like stepping stones, like boulders, like cliffsides.
There wasn’t even a hint of gray steel, or smoke. Or any land, besides what they were standing on.
He looked down at the canoes again. Somehow, they seemed even smaller.
“I, uh,” Zuko cleared his throat. “I’ll require supplies. Before I go.”
---
They... did not have supplies. Not extra ones. This didn’t stop them from trying to give him supplies, food and blankets and anything else he could think to ask for. But each blanket was a pelt hunted by someone’s grandfather, had been inked with images and stories by someone’s mother, was the favorite of someone’s husband or brother or uncle or cousin--
They couldn’t go to the nearest market to replace things, here.
And when they talked about food, about what they could spare, they kept sneaking glances to their children, who were sneaking glances at Zuko from the huts, sticking their heads just over the snowy ledges like their fur-trimmed hoods would hide them. Their mothers and aunts shooed them away, and they crept back, like barnacle-crabs. Zuko glared, and they disappeared.
“When are your men coming back?” he asked. “They’re hunting, aren’t they?”
Oh. So that was what they looked like, when they weren’t trying to hide their hate.
---
Zuko wrapped himself up in the same blanket that night. It was printed inside with fine lines and images, telling a story he didn’t know. He wondered whose favorite it was.
---
Kanna wondered how quickly he’d wake—if he’d wake—if she built the fire up with wet driftwood and tundra grass, if she had one of the younger girls boost up a child to plug the air hole, if she let the smoke draw its own blanket down over this fire child.
---
It was hard to know when to wake up, because the sun never set. So everyone was up before him, and they all had spears and clubs and—and nets, and trap lines, and snow googles with their single slat to protect the eyes from snow blindness. Zuko had seen those once, at the Ember Island Museum of Ethnography, where they’d gone when it was too rainy for anything more exciting.
Oh. They were going hunting.
“Give me that,” Zuko said, and took a spear.
The women looked at him. One of them adjusted her googles.
“I can hunt,” he scowled.
He did not, in fact, know how to hunt.
---
“Give me that,” the Fire Prince said, and Kanna almost, almost gave him her ulu. Humans, like most animals, had an artery in their legs that would bleed them quick enough.
She kept skinning the rabbit-mink one of the women had snared.
“I can help,” he said, with less grace than most of their toddlers. Likely with the skinning skills of a toddler, too. She wasn’t going to let their unwanted visitor ruin a perfectly good pelt.
“Chop the meat,” she said, and gave him a different knife. “It’s dinner.”
“...This is really sharp,” he said a moment later, looking at the knife with some surprise.
“Is it,” said Kanna.
---
Things the Fire Prince was convinced he could do: hunt (until he realized he couldn’t tell the tracks of a rabbit-mink from a leopard-rabbit apart); spear fish (at least he could dry himself); pack snow for an igloo (frustrated princes ran hot); ice fish (the prince was a problem that kept coming close to solving itself).
Things the Fire Prince could actually do: mince meat, increasingly finely; gather berries and herbs, once he stopped trying to crush them; dig roots, under toddler supervision; mend nets, after the intermediary step of learning to braid hair loopies.
“Can’t I take him ice fishing again?” asked one of the women, as she watched Prince Zuko put as much apparent concentration into braiding her daughter’s hair as his people had into exterminating hers.
“Wait,” said another woman, sitting up straight. “Wait wait wait. I just had an idea.”
---
Three words: Infinite. Hot. Water.
---
Summer was coming to an end. The sun actually set, now, and the night was getting longer, and colder. The salmon-otter nets were mended and ready. The smoking racks were still full of cod-lemmings. The children were all a little older, the women all a little more used to doing both halves of their tribes’ chores; a little more used to not watching the horizon, waiting for help to come.
The Fire Prince was staring at the canoes again.
“Are you actually going to try leaving in one of those?” Kanna asked.
“...No.”
“Come on, then; someone needs to watch the kids while the women are hunting.”
She didn’t leave him alone with them, of course. But she could have.
---
Elsewhere, the war continued.
The moon turned red, for a moment none could sleep through; they did not learn why.
The comet came and went, leaving their castaway prince laying on the beach, his breath fogging up into the night sky above him, as the energy crashed from his system as quickly as it had come. Above, lights began to dance in the sky; Zuko pulled his hood up, so none of those spirits—children, dead too soon—got any ideas about kicking his head off to be their ball.
The war had ended. The world didn’t feel any different; no one in the south would know until spring came again.
---
Suffice it to say, Sokka and Katara were not prepared for this particular homecoming.
#I find it important to note that Zuko is ABSOLUTELY mad about this in the background#It's just not helping him at all#Sokka you're their superior officer call them off#SOKKA#avatar the last airbender#atla#Aang for one LOVES a captive audience#Hey do you think we could have been friends?#Zuko: We could be friends RIGHT NOW if you UNTIED ME#Aang: DEAL#and that's how the Fire Prince became contractually bound to be the Avatar's (very grumpy) friend#(also Aang: pays the kids off with sweets behind Zuko's back)
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#I find it important to note that Zuko is ABSOLUTELY mad about this in the background#It's just not helping him at all#Sokka you're their superior officer call them off#SOKKA#Aang for one LOVES a captive audience#Hey do you think we could have been friends?#Zuko: We could be friends RIGHT NOW if you UNTIED ME#Aang: DEAL#and that's how the Fire Prince became contractually bound to be the Avatar's (very grumpy) friend#(also Aang: pays the kids off with sweets behind Zuko's back)
Hi ! prompt idea : What if Zuko was armed during the first episode and was stranded with the water tribe while the avatar left with Katara and Sokka, Iroh on his trail for white lotus reasons.
Oh we are going to have us some FUN with "stranded with the water tribe", say no more.
---
Zuko was dripping, and steaming, and staring down two dozen women and their gaggle of small children, plus that old not-the-Avatar crone from earlier. They were all cowering away from him. Which was--
Good. It was good. If they were cowering, then they hadn’t noticed how steam was not flames. He wasn’t sure he could make flames, not after the arctic water he’d landed in, with that last sight of the Avatar glowing; not after surfacing under the ice pack, after swimming, after kicking slamming breaking through and his ship was gone and there was only ocean all around and
and he’d made it back to this pathetic little camp of the Southern Water Tribe, because that was the only place he knew for sure would have shelter, and he wasn’t going to die just because they were all staring at him, even if felt like he would.
Even if the old not-the-Avatar woman could probably take him, right now. But she didn’t know that.
Zuko pulled himself up, taller than her by at least a few inches, and blew steam from his nose.
“I am commandeering one of your huts,” he said. And added, because Uncle said even a prince should be gracious: “You may choose which one.”
---
She choose her own.
...The only one without children that flames might scar, or younger women to catch a soldier’s interests.
Zuko sat by her fire and determinedly started struggling out of his wet clothes and she was still in here with him--
Zuko pulled one of her animal pelts over himself, and finished fighting off his clothes. When he stuck his head back out, cheeks still reddened from what was obviously the cold, she dropped a parka on his head.
“Dry clothes, Your Highness,” she said.
The parka was much bigger than he was. He fell asleep hoping that the camp’s men were on a long, long hunting trip.
---
He woke up again. Kanna tucked her favorite ulu knife away, newly sharpened, and stopped contemplating the alternative.
---
“I am commandeering a ship,” he said.
The crone led him across the village, all twenty paces of it, to a row of canoes.
“Take whichever one you want,” she said. “Will you need help getting it to the water?”
Zuko looked at the canoes. Looked at the ocean. Watched a leopard seal, easily the size of the largest canoe, dozing just past the ice his own ship had broken through the day before. It was frozen again, a great icy arrow pointing from the waves to the village, snow already starting to cover it over.
Beyond was blue sky and gray ocean and white ice, floating in blocks like stepping stones, like boulders, like cliffsides.
There wasn’t even a hint of gray steel, or smoke. Or any land, besides what they were standing on.
He looked down at the canoes again. Somehow, they seemed even smaller.
“I, uh,” Zuko cleared his throat. “I’ll require supplies. Before I go.”
---
They... did not have supplies. Not extra ones. This didn’t stop them from trying to give him supplies, food and blankets and anything else he could think to ask for. But each blanket was a pelt hunted by someone’s grandfather, had been inked with images and stories by someone’s mother, was the favorite of someone’s husband or brother or uncle or cousin--
They couldn’t go to the nearest market to replace things, here.
And when they talked about food, about what they could spare, they kept sneaking glances to their children, who were sneaking glances at Zuko from the huts, sticking their heads just over the snowy ledges like their fur-trimmed hoods would hide them. Their mothers and aunts shooed them away, and they crept back, like barnacle-crabs. Zuko glared, and they disappeared.
“When are your men coming back?” he asked. “They’re hunting, aren’t they?”
Oh. So that was what they looked like, when they weren’t trying to hide their hate.
---
Zuko wrapped himself up in the same blanket that night. It was printed inside with fine lines and images, telling a story he didn’t know. He wondered whose favorite it was.
---
Kanna wondered how quickly he’d wake—if he’d wake—if she built the fire up with wet driftwood and tundra grass, if she had one of the younger girls boost up a child to plug the air hole, if she let the smoke draw its own blanket down over this fire child.
---
It was hard to know when to wake up, because the sun never set. So everyone was up before him, and they all had spears and clubs and—and nets, and trap lines, and snow googles with their single slat to protect the eyes from snow blindness. Zuko had seen those once, at the Ember Island Museum of Ethnography, where they’d gone when it was too rainy for anything more exciting.
Oh. They were going hunting.
“Give me that,” Zuko said, and took a spear.
The women looked at him. One of them adjusted her googles.
“I can hunt,” he scowled.
He did not, in fact, know how to hunt.
---
“Give me that,” the Fire Prince said, and Kanna almost, almost gave him her ulu. Humans, like most animals, had an artery in their legs that would bleed them quick enough.
She kept skinning the rabbit-mink one of the women had snared.
“I can help,” he said, with less grace than most of their toddlers. Likely with the skinning skills of a toddler, too. She wasn’t going to let their unwanted visitor ruin a perfectly good pelt.
“Chop the meat,” she said, and gave him a different knife. “It’s dinner.”
“...This is really sharp,” he said a moment later, looking at the knife with some surprise.
“Is it,” said Kanna.
---
Things the Fire Prince was convinced he could do: hunt (until he realized he couldn’t tell the tracks of a rabbit-mink from a leopard-rabbit apart); spear fish (at least he could dry himself); pack snow for an igloo (frustrated princes ran hot); ice fish (the prince was a problem that kept coming close to solving itself).
Things the Fire Prince could actually do: mince meat, increasingly finely; gather berries and herbs, once he stopped trying to crush them; dig roots, under toddler supervision; mend nets, after the intermediary step of learning to braid hair loopies.
“Can’t I take him ice fishing again?” asked one of the women, as she watched Prince Zuko put as much apparent concentration into braiding her daughter’s hair as his people had into exterminating hers.
“Wait,” said another woman, sitting up straight. “Wait wait wait. I just had an idea.”
---
Three words: Infinite. Hot. Water.
---
Summer was coming to an end. The sun actually set, now, and the night was getting longer, and colder. The salmon-otter nets were mended and ready. The smoking racks were still full of cod-lemmings. The children were all a little older, the women all a little more used to doing both halves of their tribes’ chores; a little more used to not watching the horizon, waiting for help to come.
The Fire Prince was staring at the canoes again.
“Are you actually going to try leaving in one of those?” Kanna asked.
“...No.”
“Come on, then; someone needs to watch the kids while the women are hunting.”
She didn’t leave him alone with them, of course. But she could have.
---
Elsewhere, the war continued.
The moon turned red, for a moment none could sleep through; they did not learn why.
The comet came and went, leaving their castaway prince laying on the beach, his breath fogging up into the night sky above him, as the energy crashed from his system as quickly as it had come. Above, lights began to dance in the sky; Zuko pulled his hood up, so none of those spirits—children, dead too soon—got any ideas about kicking his head off to be their ball.
The war had ended. The world didn’t feel any different; no one in the south would know until spring came again.
---
Suffice it to say, Sokka and Katara were not prepared for this particular homecoming.
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Tags From Muffin on my addition:
#Absolutely agree on the crazy fallout this AU would cause all around #But specifically it is very very important to me at 3am #That you are all picturing the village toddlers ordering Zuko around like tiny drill sergeants a la Sokka in episode one #Because that is the example he set and Zuko is THEIR war prisoner #Zuko's extremely heated debates on his wartime status are actually very reassuring for their mothers to watch #Sir you are engaging in a screaming debate with a literal toddler and you are losing #(and the only thing you're lighting on fire is the air) #Anyway Zuko is very Bullied By Babies in this AU and you all need to know that #Also important: Kanna DOES NOT adopt Zuko #I cannot emphasize enough how hilarious that is for the multiverse #If only Kanna maintains her professional distance #Thereby giving Salvage!Hakoda and LittleZuko!Sokka zero legs to stand on #Do you understand my vision
I do. I see the relationship as less of adopted child, and more of a babysitter they're all protective, but wary of. He may be a child but he's the same age as their sons were when they left. Their sons who they don't know if they're still alive.
As for the point about food, even if fire benders need more, they were still prepared to feed two teens instead of one. While he's still somehow less efficient than Katara and Sokka were on their most distracted days, he goes at everything with 100% in a way that aches because he's so eager for praise and not to be ostracized, but they can't let him in the same way they might let in a Earth Kingdom refugee.
Muffin's tags on 0samue0's addition:
#we love the women keeping him extra close and extra busy when the menfolk come home #Zuko: why are you picking on me #The Women: because it's good for you #The Children: *nodding for this has been their philosophy all along* #Sokka wiping a tear from his eye: I trained you so well
And on wileycap's:
#I find it important to note that Zuko is ABSOLUTELY mad about this in the background #It's just not helping him at all #Sokka you're their superior officer call them off #SOKKA #Aang for one LOVES a captive audience #Hey do you think we could have been friends? #Zuko: We could be friends RIGHT NOW if you UNTIED ME #Aang: DEAL #and that's how the Fire Prince became contractually bound to be the Avatar's (very grumpy) friend #(also Aang: pays the kids off with sweets behind Zuko's back)
I love the idea of Aang winning his friendship quest with Zuko simply by leveling up in other areas and leaving Zuko with children for long enough. When Zuko sets the air on fire around him, the children know to bring out the snacks and use him as a portable fire and Aang is honored to learn their ways.
Katara is suspicious but her time in the Fire Nation changed her perspective on a lot of things, and her begrudging acceptance of Zuko totally happens when she's doing something and her hair comes loose. She snaps for Sokka to fix it because her hands are busy, and even after accepting that women are badass he's still her older brother and sputtering out excuses and then in between this, Zuko totally not thinking about what he's doing re-does her hair on instinct, because she had the exact same tone as the young girls that have taken to the fact he is very good at hair loopies now and make him fix their hair when it becomes clear he gives in easier than their mothers. My boy doesn't even notice both siblings staring at him as he returns to his task and walks away. Aang has sparkles in his eyes. Sokka is annoyed on principle because how is Zuko better at him at this when he's not even Water Tribe(practice Sokka, practice)?
And this begs the question of does Zuko want to return? Does he have a choice? Because at the end of the day the tribeswomen took care of him when they didn't have to. And it's his duty to return and become Iroh's heir, but what is that worth? Has he changed too much? Will the Fire Nation want him back after the shock of his survival wears off, and there's the same banished unworthy prince with his knowledge of his home dulled by being at sea and then in a foreign land? Because even if we think Zuko has reconnected with a part of his history that he buried, I don't think his inner monologue will see it that way. And even Aang and the water tribes women and children keeping him distracted and away from the important debates about what to do now, doesn't stop the thoughts that keep him up at night.
Hi ! prompt idea : What if Zuko was armed during the first episode and was stranded with the water tribe while the avatar left with Katara and Sokka, Iroh on his trail for white lotus reasons.
Oh we are going to have us some FUN with "stranded with the water tribe", say no more.
---
Zuko was dripping, and steaming, and staring down two dozen women and their gaggle of small children, plus that old not-the-Avatar crone from earlier. They were all cowering away from him. Which was--
Good. It was good. If they were cowering, then they hadn’t noticed how steam was not flames. He wasn’t sure he could make flames, not after the arctic water he’d landed in, with that last sight of the Avatar glowing; not after surfacing under the ice pack, after swimming, after kicking slamming breaking through and his ship was gone and there was only ocean all around and
and he’d made it back to this pathetic little camp of the Southern Water Tribe, because that was the only place he knew for sure would have shelter, and he wasn’t going to die just because they were all staring at him, even if felt like he would.
Even if the old not-the-Avatar woman could probably take him, right now. But she didn’t know that.
Zuko pulled himself up, taller than her by at least a few inches, and blew steam from his nose.
“I am commandeering one of your huts,” he said. And added, because Uncle said even a prince should be gracious: “You may choose which one.”
---
She choose her own.
...The only one without children that flames might scar, or younger women to catch a soldier’s interests.
Zuko sat by her fire and determinedly started struggling out of his wet clothes and she was still in here with him--
Zuko pulled one of her animal pelts over himself, and finished fighting off his clothes. When he stuck his head back out, cheeks still reddened from what was obviously the cold, she dropped a parka on his head.
“Dry clothes, Your Highness,” she said.
The parka was much bigger than he was. He fell asleep hoping that the camp’s men were on a long, long hunting trip.
---
He woke up again. Kanna tucked her favorite ulu knife away, newly sharpened, and stopped contemplating the alternative.
---
“I am commandeering a ship,” he said.
The crone led him across the village, all twenty paces of it, to a row of canoes.
“Take whichever one you want,” she said. “Will you need help getting it to the water?”
Zuko looked at the canoes. Looked at the ocean. Watched a leopard seal, easily the size of the largest canoe, dozing just past the ice his own ship had broken through the day before. It was frozen again, a great icy arrow pointing from the waves to the village, snow already starting to cover it over.
Beyond was blue sky and gray ocean and white ice, floating in blocks like stepping stones, like boulders, like cliffsides.
There wasn’t even a hint of gray steel, or smoke. Or any land, besides what they were standing on.
He looked down at the canoes again. Somehow, they seemed even smaller.
“I, uh,” Zuko cleared his throat. “I’ll require supplies. Before I go.”
---
They... did not have supplies. Not extra ones. This didn’t stop them from trying to give him supplies, food and blankets and anything else he could think to ask for. But each blanket was a pelt hunted by someone’s grandfather, had been inked with images and stories by someone’s mother, was the favorite of someone’s husband or brother or uncle or cousin--
They couldn’t go to the nearest market to replace things, here.
And when they talked about food, about what they could spare, they kept sneaking glances to their children, who were sneaking glances at Zuko from the huts, sticking their heads just over the snowy ledges like their fur-trimmed hoods would hide them. Their mothers and aunts shooed them away, and they crept back, like barnacle-crabs. Zuko glared, and they disappeared.
“When are your men coming back?” he asked. “They’re hunting, aren’t they?”
Oh. So that was what they looked like, when they weren’t trying to hide their hate.
---
Zuko wrapped himself up in the same blanket that night. It was printed inside with fine lines and images, telling a story he didn’t know. He wondered whose favorite it was.
---
Kanna wondered how quickly he’d wake—if he’d wake—if she built the fire up with wet driftwood and tundra grass, if she had one of the younger girls boost up a child to plug the air hole, if she let the smoke draw its own blanket down over this fire child.
---
It was hard to know when to wake up, because the sun never set. So everyone was up before him, and they all had spears and clubs and—and nets, and trap lines, and snow googles with their single slat to protect the eyes from snow blindness. Zuko had seen those once, at the Ember Island Museum of Ethnography, where they’d gone when it was too rainy for anything more exciting.
Oh. They were going hunting.
“Give me that,” Zuko said, and took a spear.
The women looked at him. One of them adjusted her googles.
“I can hunt,” he scowled.
He did not, in fact, know how to hunt.
---
“Give me that,” the Fire Prince said, and Kanna almost, almost gave him her ulu. Humans, like most animals, had an artery in their legs that would bleed them quick enough.
She kept skinning the rabbit-mink one of the women had snared.
“I can help,” he said, with less grace than most of their toddlers. Likely with the skinning skills of a toddler, too. She wasn’t going to let their unwanted visitor ruin a perfectly good pelt.
“Chop the meat,” she said, and gave him a different knife. “It’s dinner.”
“...This is really sharp,” he said a moment later, looking at the knife with some surprise.
“Is it,” said Kanna.
---
Things the Fire Prince was convinced he could do: hunt (until he realized he couldn’t tell the tracks of a rabbit-mink from a leopard-rabbit apart); spear fish (at least he could dry himself); pack snow for an igloo (frustrated princes ran hot); ice fish (the prince was a problem that kept coming close to solving itself).
Things the Fire Prince could actually do: mince meat, increasingly finely; gather berries and herbs, once he stopped trying to crush them; dig roots, under toddler supervision; mend nets, after the intermediary step of learning to braid hair loopies.
“Can’t I take him ice fishing again?” asked one of the women, as she watched Prince Zuko put as much apparent concentration into braiding her daughter’s hair as his people had into exterminating hers.
“Wait,” said another woman, sitting up straight. “Wait wait wait. I just had an idea.”
---
Three words: Infinite. Hot. Water.
---
Summer was coming to an end. The sun actually set, now, and the night was getting longer, and colder. The salmon-otter nets were mended and ready. The smoking racks were still full of cod-lemmings. The children were all a little older, the women all a little more used to doing both halves of their tribes’ chores; a little more used to not watching the horizon, waiting for help to come.
The Fire Prince was staring at the canoes again.
“Are you actually going to try leaving in one of those?” Kanna asked.
“...No.”
“Come on, then; someone needs to watch the kids while the women are hunting.”
She didn’t leave him alone with them, of course. But she could have.
---
Elsewhere, the war continued.
The moon turned red, for a moment none could sleep through; they did not learn why.
The comet came and went, leaving their castaway prince laying on the beach, his breath fogging up into the night sky above him, as the energy crashed from his system as quickly as it had come. Above, lights began to dance in the sky; Zuko pulled his hood up, so none of those spirits—children, dead too soon—got any ideas about kicking his head off to be their ball.
The war had ended. The world didn’t feel any different; no one in the south would know until spring came again.
---
Suffice it to say, Sokka and Katara were not prepared for this particular homecoming.
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muffinlance don't leave these in the tags:
#I find it important to note that Zuko is ABSOLUTELY mad about this in the background#It's just not helping him at all#Sokka you're their superior officer call them off#SOKKA#avatar the last airbender#atla#Aang for one LOVES a captive audience#Hey do you think we could have been friends?#Zuko: We could be friends RIGHT NOW if you UNTIED ME#Aang: DEAL#and that's how the Fire Prince became contractually bound to be the Avatar's (very grumpy) friend#(also Aang: pays the kids off with sweets behind Zuko's back)
Hi ! prompt idea : What if Zuko was armed during the first episode and was stranded with the water tribe while the avatar left with Katara and Sokka, Iroh on his trail for white lotus reasons.
Oh we are going to have us some FUN with "stranded with the water tribe", say no more.
---
Zuko was dripping, and steaming, and staring down two dozen women and their gaggle of small children, plus that old not-the-Avatar crone from earlier. They were all cowering away from him. Which was--
Good. It was good. If they were cowering, then they hadn’t noticed how steam was not flames. He wasn’t sure he could make flames, not after the arctic water he’d landed in, with that last sight of the Avatar glowing; not after surfacing under the ice pack, after swimming, after kicking slamming breaking through and his ship was gone and there was only ocean all around and
and he’d made it back to this pathetic little camp of the Southern Water Tribe, because that was the only place he knew for sure would have shelter, and he wasn’t going to die just because they were all staring at him, even if felt like he would.
Even if the old not-the-Avatar woman could probably take him, right now. But she didn’t know that.
Zuko pulled himself up, taller than her by at least a few inches, and blew steam from his nose.
“I am commandeering one of your huts,” he said. And added, because Uncle said even a prince should be gracious: “You may choose which one.”
---
She choose her own.
...The only one without children that flames might scar, or younger women to catch a soldier’s interests.
Zuko sat by her fire and determinedly started struggling out of his wet clothes and she was still in here with him--
Zuko pulled one of her animal pelts over himself, and finished fighting off his clothes. When he stuck his head back out, cheeks still reddened from what was obviously the cold, she dropped a parka on his head.
“Dry clothes, Your Highness,” she said.
The parka was much bigger than he was. He fell asleep hoping that the camp’s men were on a long, long hunting trip.
---
He woke up again. Kanna tucked her favorite ulu knife away, newly sharpened, and stopped contemplating the alternative.
---
“I am commandeering a ship,” he said.
The crone led him across the village, all twenty paces of it, to a row of canoes.
“Take whichever one you want,” she said. “Will you need help getting it to the water?”
Zuko looked at the canoes. Looked at the ocean. Watched a leopard seal, easily the size of the largest canoe, dozing just past the ice his own ship had broken through the day before. It was frozen again, a great icy arrow pointing from the waves to the village, snow already starting to cover it over.
Beyond was blue sky and gray ocean and white ice, floating in blocks like stepping stones, like boulders, like cliffsides.
There wasn’t even a hint of gray steel, or smoke. Or any land, besides what they were standing on.
He looked down at the canoes again. Somehow, they seemed even smaller.
“I, uh,” Zuko cleared his throat. “I’ll require supplies. Before I go.”
---
They... did not have supplies. Not extra ones. This didn’t stop them from trying to give him supplies, food and blankets and anything else he could think to ask for. But each blanket was a pelt hunted by someone’s grandfather, had been inked with images and stories by someone’s mother, was the favorite of someone’s husband or brother or uncle or cousin--
They couldn’t go to the nearest market to replace things, here.
And when they talked about food, about what they could spare, they kept sneaking glances to their children, who were sneaking glances at Zuko from the huts, sticking their heads just over the snowy ledges like their fur-trimmed hoods would hide them. Their mothers and aunts shooed them away, and they crept back, like barnacle-crabs. Zuko glared, and they disappeared.
“When are your men coming back?” he asked. “They’re hunting, aren’t they?”
Oh. So that was what they looked like, when they weren’t trying to hide their hate.
---
Zuko wrapped himself up in the same blanket that night. It was printed inside with fine lines and images, telling a story he didn’t know. He wondered whose favorite it was.
---
Kanna wondered how quickly he’d wake—if he’d wake—if she built the fire up with wet driftwood and tundra grass, if she had one of the younger girls boost up a child to plug the air hole, if she let the smoke draw its own blanket down over this fire child.
---
It was hard to know when to wake up, because the sun never set. So everyone was up before him, and they all had spears and clubs and—and nets, and trap lines, and snow googles with their single slat to protect the eyes from snow blindness. Zuko had seen those once, at the Ember Island Museum of Ethnography, where they’d gone when it was too rainy for anything more exciting.
Oh. They were going hunting.
“Give me that,” Zuko said, and took a spear.
The women looked at him. One of them adjusted her googles.
“I can hunt,” he scowled.
He did not, in fact, know how to hunt.
---
“Give me that,” the Fire Prince said, and Kanna almost, almost gave him her ulu. Humans, like most animals, had an artery in their legs that would bleed them quick enough.
She kept skinning the rabbit-mink one of the women had snared.
“I can help,” he said, with less grace than most of their toddlers. Likely with the skinning skills of a toddler, too. She wasn’t going to let their unwanted visitor ruin a perfectly good pelt.
“Chop the meat,” she said, and gave him a different knife. “It’s dinner.”
“...This is really sharp,” he said a moment later, looking at the knife with some surprise.
“Is it,” said Kanna.
---
Things the Fire Prince was convinced he could do: hunt (until he realized he couldn’t tell the tracks of a rabbit-mink from a leopard-rabbit apart); spear fish (at least he could dry himself); pack snow for an igloo (frustrated princes ran hot); ice fish (the prince was a problem that kept coming close to solving itself).
Things the Fire Prince could actually do: mince meat, increasingly finely; gather berries and herbs, once he stopped trying to crush them; dig roots, under toddler supervision; mend nets, after the intermediary step of learning to braid hair loopies.
“Can’t I take him ice fishing again?” asked one of the women, as she watched Prince Zuko put as much apparent concentration into braiding her daughter’s hair as his people had into exterminating hers.
“Wait,” said another woman, sitting up straight. “Wait wait wait. I just had an idea.”
---
Three words: Infinite. Hot. Water.
---
Summer was coming to an end. The sun actually set, now, and the night was getting longer, and colder. The salmon-otter nets were mended and ready. The smoking racks were still full of cod-lemmings. The children were all a little older, the women all a little more used to doing both halves of their tribes’ chores; a little more used to not watching the horizon, waiting for help to come.
The Fire Prince was staring at the canoes again.
“Are you actually going to try leaving in one of those?” Kanna asked.
“...No.”
“Come on, then; someone needs to watch the kids while the women are hunting.”
She didn’t leave him alone with them, of course. But she could have.
---
Elsewhere, the war continued.
The moon turned red, for a moment none could sleep through; they did not learn why.
The comet came and went, leaving their castaway prince laying on the beach, his breath fogging up into the night sky above him, as the energy crashed from his system as quickly as it had come. Above, lights began to dance in the sky; Zuko pulled his hood up, so none of those spirits—children, dead too soon—got any ideas about kicking his head off to be their ball.
The war had ended. The world didn’t feel any different; no one in the south would know until spring came again.
---
Suffice it to say, Sokka and Katara were not prepared for this particular homecoming.
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#I find it important to note that Zuko is ABSOLUTELY mad about this in the background#It's just not helping him at all#Sokka you're their superior officer call them off#SOKKA#avatar the last airbender#atla#Aang for one LOVES a captive audience#Hey do you think we could have been friends?#Zuko: We could be friends RIGHT NOW if you UNTIED ME#Aang: DEAL#and that's how the Fire Prince became contractually bound to be the Avatar's (very grumpy) friend#(also Aang: pays the kids off with sweets behind Zuko's back)
At some point they have to deal with him though, right?
Endless hot water and and instant cook fires are all well and good, and it was nice having an extra pair of youthful strong hands when the men were away, inexperience as they were with even the most basic skills a child can master. But it can't last with the winter. He's a firebender. He rises with the sun.
He's a Fire Nation prince. He was raised and groomed for a different life, even if it was in a nest of venomous viper rats. He can't stay in the South Pole, so what do they do with him? Send him back?
(Is Uncle Fire Lord? Even if he is, he left Zuko behind. Would he even want Zuko back now? Would Zuko want to go back??)
(Yes, obviously, he wants that more than anything, except it's not going to be like anything he wanted at all anymore, is it?)
Air Nomads get restless quick. Maybe Aang gets itchy and offers to take his new best friend with him. Appa can fly anywhere, after all. So where does Zuko want to go?
Hi ! prompt idea : What if Zuko was armed during the first episode and was stranded with the water tribe while the avatar left with Katara and Sokka, Iroh on his trail for white lotus reasons.
Oh we are going to have us some FUN with "stranded with the water tribe", say no more.
---
Zuko was dripping, and steaming, and staring down two dozen women and their gaggle of small children, plus that old not-the-Avatar crone from earlier. They were all cowering away from him. Which was--
Good. It was good. If they were cowering, then they hadn’t noticed how steam was not flames. He wasn’t sure he could make flames, not after the arctic water he’d landed in, with that last sight of the Avatar glowing; not after surfacing under the ice pack, after swimming, after kicking slamming breaking through and his ship was gone and there was only ocean all around and
and he’d made it back to this pathetic little camp of the Southern Water Tribe, because that was the only place he knew for sure would have shelter, and he wasn’t going to die just because they were all staring at him, even if felt like he would.
Even if the old not-the-Avatar woman could probably take him, right now. But she didn’t know that.
Zuko pulled himself up, taller than her by at least a few inches, and blew steam from his nose.
“I am commandeering one of your huts,” he said. And added, because Uncle said even a prince should be gracious: “You may choose which one.”
---
She choose her own.
...The only one without children that flames might scar, or younger women to catch a soldier’s interests.
Zuko sat by her fire and determinedly started struggling out of his wet clothes and she was still in here with him--
Zuko pulled one of her animal pelts over himself, and finished fighting off his clothes. When he stuck his head back out, cheeks still reddened from what was obviously the cold, she dropped a parka on his head.
“Dry clothes, Your Highness,” she said.
The parka was much bigger than he was. He fell asleep hoping that the camp’s men were on a long, long hunting trip.
---
He woke up again. Kanna tucked her favorite ulu knife away, newly sharpened, and stopped contemplating the alternative.
---
“I am commandeering a ship,” he said.
The crone led him across the village, all twenty paces of it, to a row of canoes.
“Take whichever one you want,” she said. “Will you need help getting it to the water?”
Zuko looked at the canoes. Looked at the ocean. Watched a leopard seal, easily the size of the largest canoe, dozing just past the ice his own ship had broken through the day before. It was frozen again, a great icy arrow pointing from the waves to the village, snow already starting to cover it over.
Beyond was blue sky and gray ocean and white ice, floating in blocks like stepping stones, like boulders, like cliffsides.
There wasn’t even a hint of gray steel, or smoke. Or any land, besides what they were standing on.
He looked down at the canoes again. Somehow, they seemed even smaller.
“I, uh,” Zuko cleared his throat. “I’ll require supplies. Before I go.”
---
They... did not have supplies. Not extra ones. This didn’t stop them from trying to give him supplies, food and blankets and anything else he could think to ask for. But each blanket was a pelt hunted by someone’s grandfather, had been inked with images and stories by someone’s mother, was the favorite of someone’s husband or brother or uncle or cousin--
They couldn’t go to the nearest market to replace things, here.
And when they talked about food, about what they could spare, they kept sneaking glances to their children, who were sneaking glances at Zuko from the huts, sticking their heads just over the snowy ledges like their fur-trimmed hoods would hide them. Their mothers and aunts shooed them away, and they crept back, like barnacle-crabs. Zuko glared, and they disappeared.
“When are your men coming back?” he asked. “They’re hunting, aren’t they?”
Oh. So that was what they looked like, when they weren’t trying to hide their hate.
---
Zuko wrapped himself up in the same blanket that night. It was printed inside with fine lines and images, telling a story he didn’t know. He wondered whose favorite it was.
---
Kanna wondered how quickly he’d wake—if he’d wake—if she built the fire up with wet driftwood and tundra grass, if she had one of the younger girls boost up a child to plug the air hole, if she let the smoke draw its own blanket down over this fire child.
---
It was hard to know when to wake up, because the sun never set. So everyone was up before him, and they all had spears and clubs and—and nets, and trap lines, and snow googles with their single slat to protect the eyes from snow blindness. Zuko had seen those once, at the Ember Island Museum of Ethnography, where they’d gone when it was too rainy for anything more exciting.
Oh. They were going hunting.
“Give me that,” Zuko said, and took a spear.
The women looked at him. One of them adjusted her googles.
“I can hunt,” he scowled.
He did not, in fact, know how to hunt.
---
“Give me that,” the Fire Prince said, and Kanna almost, almost gave him her ulu. Humans, like most animals, had an artery in their legs that would bleed them quick enough.
She kept skinning the rabbit-mink one of the women had snared.
“I can help,” he said, with less grace than most of their toddlers. Likely with the skinning skills of a toddler, too. She wasn’t going to let their unwanted visitor ruin a perfectly good pelt.
“Chop the meat,” she said, and gave him a different knife. “It’s dinner.”
“...This is really sharp,” he said a moment later, looking at the knife with some surprise.
“Is it,” said Kanna.
---
Things the Fire Prince was convinced he could do: hunt (until he realized he couldn’t tell the tracks of a rabbit-mink from a leopard-rabbit apart); spear fish (at least he could dry himself); pack snow for an igloo (frustrated princes ran hot); ice fish (the prince was a problem that kept coming close to solving itself).
Things the Fire Prince could actually do: mince meat, increasingly finely; gather berries and herbs, once he stopped trying to crush them; dig roots, under toddler supervision; mend nets, after the intermediary step of learning to braid hair loopies.
“Can’t I take him ice fishing again?” asked one of the women, as she watched Prince Zuko put as much apparent concentration into braiding her daughter’s hair as his people had into exterminating hers.
“Wait,” said another woman, sitting up straight. “Wait wait wait. I just had an idea.”
---
Three words: Infinite. Hot. Water.
---
Summer was coming to an end. The sun actually set, now, and the night was getting longer, and colder. The salmon-otter nets were mended and ready. The smoking racks were still full of cod-lemmings. The children were all a little older, the women all a little more used to doing both halves of their tribes’ chores; a little more used to not watching the horizon, waiting for help to come.
The Fire Prince was staring at the canoes again.
“Are you actually going to try leaving in one of those?” Kanna asked.
“...No.”
“Come on, then; someone needs to watch the kids while the women are hunting.”
She didn’t leave him alone with them, of course. But she could have.
---
Elsewhere, the war continued.
The moon turned red, for a moment none could sleep through; they did not learn why.
The comet came and went, leaving their castaway prince laying on the beach, his breath fogging up into the night sky above him, as the energy crashed from his system as quickly as it had come. Above, lights began to dance in the sky; Zuko pulled his hood up, so none of those spirits—children, dead too soon—got any ideas about kicking his head off to be their ball.
The war had ended. The world didn’t feel any different; no one in the south would know until spring came again.
---
Suffice it to say, Sokka and Katara were not prepared for this particular homecoming.
#toph wasn't made to wear boots either#get her out of here twinkle toes#and of curse where aang goes katara has to follow#and if everyone ELSE is leaving sokka can't leave that trainwreck waiting to happen unsupervised
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#I find it important to note that Zuko is ABSOLUTELY mad about this in the background#It's just not helping him at all#Sokka you're their superior officer call them off#SOKKA#avatar the last airbender#atla#Aang for one LOVES a captive audience#Hey do you think we could have been friends?#Zuko: We could be friends RIGHT NOW if you UNTIED ME#Aang: DEAL#and that's how the Fire Prince became contractually bound to be the Avatar's (very grumpy) friend#(also Aang: pays the kids off with sweets behind Zuko's back)
Hi ! prompt idea : What if Zuko was armed during the first episode and was stranded with the water tribe while the avatar left with Katara and Sokka, Iroh on his trail for white lotus reasons.
Oh we are going to have us some FUN with "stranded with the water tribe", say no more.
---
Zuko was dripping, and steaming, and staring down two dozen women and their gaggle of small children, plus that old not-the-Avatar crone from earlier. They were all cowering away from him. Which was--
Good. It was good. If they were cowering, then they hadn’t noticed how steam was not flames. He wasn’t sure he could make flames, not after the arctic water he’d landed in, with that last sight of the Avatar glowing; not after surfacing under the ice pack, after swimming, after kicking slamming breaking through and his ship was gone and there was only ocean all around and
and he’d made it back to this pathetic little camp of the Southern Water Tribe, because that was the only place he knew for sure would have shelter, and he wasn’t going to die just because they were all staring at him, even if felt like he would.
Even if the old not-the-Avatar woman could probably take him, right now. But she didn’t know that.
Zuko pulled himself up, taller than her by at least a few inches, and blew steam from his nose.
“I am commandeering one of your huts,” he said. And added, because Uncle said even a prince should be gracious: “You may choose which one.”
---
She choose her own.
...The only one without children that flames might scar, or younger women to catch a soldier’s interests.
Zuko sat by her fire and determinedly started struggling out of his wet clothes and she was still in here with him--
Zuko pulled one of her animal pelts over himself, and finished fighting off his clothes. When he stuck his head back out, cheeks still reddened from what was obviously the cold, she dropped a parka on his head.
“Dry clothes, Your Highness,” she said.
The parka was much bigger than he was. He fell asleep hoping that the camp’s men were on a long, long hunting trip.
---
He woke up again. Kanna tucked her favorite ulu knife away, newly sharpened, and stopped contemplating the alternative.
---
“I am commandeering a ship,” he said.
The crone led him across the village, all twenty paces of it, to a row of canoes.
“Take whichever one you want,” she said. “Will you need help getting it to the water?”
Zuko looked at the canoes. Looked at the ocean. Watched a leopard seal, easily the size of the largest canoe, dozing just past the ice his own ship had broken through the day before. It was frozen again, a great icy arrow pointing from the waves to the village, snow already starting to cover it over.
Beyond was blue sky and gray ocean and white ice, floating in blocks like stepping stones, like boulders, like cliffsides.
There wasn’t even a hint of gray steel, or smoke. Or any land, besides what they were standing on.
He looked down at the canoes again. Somehow, they seemed even smaller.
“I, uh,” Zuko cleared his throat. “I’ll require supplies. Before I go.”
---
They... did not have supplies. Not extra ones. This didn’t stop them from trying to give him supplies, food and blankets and anything else he could think to ask for. But each blanket was a pelt hunted by someone’s grandfather, had been inked with images and stories by someone’s mother, was the favorite of someone’s husband or brother or uncle or cousin--
They couldn’t go to the nearest market to replace things, here.
And when they talked about food, about what they could spare, they kept sneaking glances to their children, who were sneaking glances at Zuko from the huts, sticking their heads just over the snowy ledges like their fur-trimmed hoods would hide them. Their mothers and aunts shooed them away, and they crept back, like barnacle-crabs. Zuko glared, and they disappeared.
“When are your men coming back?” he asked. “They’re hunting, aren’t they?”
Oh. So that was what they looked like, when they weren’t trying to hide their hate.
---
Zuko wrapped himself up in the same blanket that night. It was printed inside with fine lines and images, telling a story he didn’t know. He wondered whose favorite it was.
---
Kanna wondered how quickly he’d wake—if he’d wake—if she built the fire up with wet driftwood and tundra grass, if she had one of the younger girls boost up a child to plug the air hole, if she let the smoke draw its own blanket down over this fire child.
---
It was hard to know when to wake up, because the sun never set. So everyone was up before him, and they all had spears and clubs and—and nets, and trap lines, and snow googles with their single slat to protect the eyes from snow blindness. Zuko had seen those once, at the Ember Island Museum of Ethnography, where they’d gone when it was too rainy for anything more exciting.
Oh. They were going hunting.
“Give me that,” Zuko said, and took a spear.
The women looked at him. One of them adjusted her googles.
“I can hunt,” he scowled.
He did not, in fact, know how to hunt.
---
“Give me that,” the Fire Prince said, and Kanna almost, almost gave him her ulu. Humans, like most animals, had an artery in their legs that would bleed them quick enough.
She kept skinning the rabbit-mink one of the women had snared.
“I can help,” he said, with less grace than most of their toddlers. Likely with the skinning skills of a toddler, too. She wasn’t going to let their unwanted visitor ruin a perfectly good pelt.
“Chop the meat,” she said, and gave him a different knife. “It’s dinner.”
“...This is really sharp,” he said a moment later, looking at the knife with some surprise.
“Is it,” said Kanna.
---
Things the Fire Prince was convinced he could do: hunt (until he realized he couldn’t tell the tracks of a rabbit-mink from a leopard-rabbit apart); spear fish (at least he could dry himself); pack snow for an igloo (frustrated princes ran hot); ice fish (the prince was a problem that kept coming close to solving itself).
Things the Fire Prince could actually do: mince meat, increasingly finely; gather berries and herbs, once he stopped trying to crush them; dig roots, under toddler supervision; mend nets, after the intermediary step of learning to braid hair loopies.
“Can’t I take him ice fishing again?” asked one of the women, as she watched Prince Zuko put as much apparent concentration into braiding her daughter’s hair as his people had into exterminating hers.
“Wait,” said another woman, sitting up straight. “Wait wait wait. I just had an idea.”
---
Three words: Infinite. Hot. Water.
---
Summer was coming to an end. The sun actually set, now, and the night was getting longer, and colder. The salmon-otter nets were mended and ready. The smoking racks were still full of cod-lemmings. The children were all a little older, the women all a little more used to doing both halves of their tribes’ chores; a little more used to not watching the horizon, waiting for help to come.
The Fire Prince was staring at the canoes again.
“Are you actually going to try leaving in one of those?” Kanna asked.
“...No.”
“Come on, then; someone needs to watch the kids while the women are hunting.”
She didn’t leave him alone with them, of course. But she could have.
---
Elsewhere, the war continued.
The moon turned red, for a moment none could sleep through; they did not learn why.
The comet came and went, leaving their castaway prince laying on the beach, his breath fogging up into the night sky above him, as the energy crashed from his system as quickly as it had come. Above, lights began to dance in the sky; Zuko pulled his hood up, so none of those spirits—children, dead too soon—got any ideas about kicking his head off to be their ball.
The war had ended. The world didn’t feel any different; no one in the south would know until spring came again.
---
Suffice it to say, Sokka and Katara were not prepared for this particular homecoming.
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