#naviwrites

[marginal-notes]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/10 Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: The Gaang & Zuko (Avatar) Characters: Zuko (Avatar), Aang (Avatar), Katara (Avatar), Sokka (Avatar), Toph Beifong, Azula (Avatar), Iroh (Avatar) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Spirit Shenanigans, Found Family, on making your own home, and relearning who you are as a person, mild body horror, as a treat, the continuing consequences of Zuko’s deal, Iroh real estate shopping in Upper Ring: One Day™, Sokka: look at all these deals Zuko taught me to haggle for, Toph: and look at all these scams Zuko taught me how to run, more prison breaks for the whole family, Other Additional Tags to Be Added Series: Part 3 of i promised you no such thing as heaven Summary:

Katara watches as Zuko sways slightly in the wind, as he in turn watches the land roll by below. “The worst part is,” he says. “I’m not sure how many of us remember why Fire Lord Sozin started the war anymore. After we remove Ozai, there will be … there will be a lot of work to do.” Remove, she notices. Not defeat.

Or: different preparations of xifan, multiple near misses with civil wars, several charges of breaking and entering, and the intrinsic appeal of dumb code names.

~~~

THAT’S RIGHT, YOU THOUGHT YOU SAW THE LAST OF ME.

[chutneypudi]

Working title: How Sitah Lost her Tiger
Genre: Fairytales for grown up children
Themes: Friendship, love, growing up, obedience 
SO 
This is a story about two young girls who find themselves on a flying turtle, and learn to live, to grow up and love each other while trying to make sense of the world around them. They meet first in a small village called Silsi, and become inevitable friends. Sitah at the time is starting to learn that she can speak to animals, and if she asks them real nice, they would actually listen to her. Tara, on the other hand has just been separated from her sister and has moved to the village with her mother following the demise of her grandfather. She does not know it yet, but she is the princess that the village has been waiting for. That’s all I’ve got by way of introduction. Shoot me a line if you want to be included in the tag list and find out how they actually make it to the top of a flying turtle. So far, I’ve got one brave soul @shakspaeree volunteering to my tag list but shoot me an owl if you want to hear more about it. I can only promise that it is going to be very wonky and a lot of fun. I’m really hoping to publish it one day. Ah! The dream! Come join. Ask me kweschuns about how this is going to work. Say hi! I don’t bite ::)

[marginal-notes]

random snippets #2

Bits and bobs of something Katara-centric, following her through the years. What does it take to rebuild a community and what does it mean to be the significant other of the Avatar. 

~~~~~~~

Katara had to actively bully--“Standing up for yourself,” Suki corrected--her way into convincing the men from the Northern Water Tribe to teach her how to erect buildings and create walls. 

~~~

Hakoda regarded the envoys from the Northern Tribe with a carefully balanced mix of gratitude, suspicion, and ambivalence. 

~~~

Zuko snorted. “Fire Lord Azulon would hate being remembered as a reformer.” 

~~~

“Are you happy?” Zuko asked. 

Katara looked up at his concern with surprise. She opened her mouth with an instantaneous “yes” posed upon the flat of her tongue, but his frown cut her off. The air tilted, tipped over by a sudden tenseness she couldn’t give form to. The scar cast an uneven edge to the drawn in severity of his remaining eyebrow and once again she was struck, perhaps unfairly, by all the traces of his father she could see in the lines of his jaw and the slant of his cheekbones. How much of Katara’s mother did Hakoda see within her?

In the garden, the sōzu clunked again. 

“I am,” she said. “I am,” she simply repeated. There was no need to convince anyone of the fact; it was a concise, absolute truth. Of course she was. 

And she was. By now, the residential sections of her village must be completely finished. She’d return home, sitting besides Aang on Appa’s head in short bursts of warm companionship, in time for the completion of the common areas in the village center where they would share their food and dance to stories of old. She’d make her mark in the ice, which future generations would keep permanent in remembrance. Katara could think about future generations. 

A sigh slipped out of Zuko and he smiled, a small suggestion at relief, and he said, “I’m glad.” 

[marginal-notes]

but the well is dry (chapter 6 preview)

Some facts.

First, draining or not, the boiling lake makes the entire prison almost unbearably hot. Coupled with the blazing heat of the sun, there’s a reason why once indoors, everyone can instantly smell who just came in from outside.

Second, no amount of misgivings from Sokka kept Katara from borderline obsessively cataloguing all sources of water or any liquid which could give her an edge once opportunity arises. Sweat, she decided six days in, should definitely count.

Third, what Katara lacks in training, she more than makes up through sheer adrenaline and desperation right now.

[marginal-notes]

Still steadily mowing my way through one shot ideas originating from 2021-22.

AKA I’ll always be unhinged for the All For One quirk.

How had All For One’s body adapted to the rapid expression of so many different quirks? How did his conscious control interact with his quirk factor? For passive phenotypic expressions of quirk factors, how did that interact with more active quirks like emitting light or other forms of energy? How did his neurological and endocrine systems differentiate between expressing a quirk exclusively for setting sparks from his fingertips versus a quirk that exclusively emitted flames from his palms? Were there quirks that produced unique enzymes that could trigger adverse reactions from his immune system and thus barred from active expression? What was in his quirk factor that developed such fine control, and could that be trained in other people through extensive practice? How many quirks could he use simultaneously? Did combinations of quirk expression effectively count as an entirely new, singular quirk to his body, like a child inheriting from parent attributes? How was his quirk factor able to so thoroughly interact with other people’s quirk factors? Could that be isolated out for other people to simulate and replicate? Were there any quirks that the man fundamentally could not take and express? Did acquired quirks still demonstrate evolutions and adaptions over time with use and stress? Or had the act of separating a quirk from its original carrier permanently arrested the development of the quirk, no matter the later continuous use?

[marginal-notes]

Sometimes you revisit old WIPs to see what you can whip out quickly and you find lines like:

Four hours later, when Hawks begrudgingly wakes up to the demands of his alarm clock, he’s regrettably still possessed.

[marginal-notes]

I’m not saying that Lu Ten in the “no heaven” series is a bad guy, I’m just saying that he’s absolutely a product of his environment and how his parents raised him. And Zuko has an incredibly skewed view of his cousin.

A sort of spoiler snippet under the cut because UGH I have too many thoughts about these completely made up character dynamics that’s pure headcanon with barely any canon scaffolding to build on.

Lu Ten laughed as he poured out another cup of tea gently warmed by the small flame flickering from his left pointer finger resting against the teapot’s base. “Zuko’s a cute kid, it’s great. You should have seen him after last week’s play. It’s just too unfortunate about Azula.” He set the teapot back in its right place. As he lifted his cup for a sip, the curls of steam were too thin to obscure the glint in his eyes as he said, “That girl’s got a mind that’s too sharp for her own good.”

“Lu Ten,” Iroh gently admonished.

But his son only shrugged, took another sip, and told him, “You know I’m right. If we’re not careful, she’s going to grow into someone more powerful than we can handle.”

Sure Lu Ten has some genuine affection for his kid cousin, but he still grew up with the politics and infighting dumped all over the inner workings of the royal family.

[marginal-notes]

If I don’t post a new chapter to either the “no heaven” or “hellfire” series by the end of this year, I WILL lose it. At the very least, “no heaven” deserves to reach its conclusion because I wrote most of part 4 literally years ago and I like it a lot. And “hellfire,” on principle, terrifies me because I’ve been thinking about it nearly nonstop all year, there are so many parts coming to that series, the outline/written content for everything after part 1 is over 80 pages, and I also have the final scene of it already written and really want to reach it.

To tide us all over in the meanwhile, here’s some stuff I had to chop out of “little vision” because it doesn’t work anymore.

~~~~~

It takes Toph joining and her refusal to even pretend to look directly at people when she talks to them for him to realize that he’s been getting steadily wound up tighter and tighter with a desperate need for people to stop staring at him in every conversation. Staring at him, the way Katara and Sokka and, to an extent, Aang do increasingly in recent days. They don’t force him to look back, but he feels how their eyes chase his, and he finds himself bracing for a confrontation even over something as stupid as what they should make for lunch that day or whether Appa found enough greens to eat. The worst part is, everything else about their tone and their posture would still be so carefree or peaceful or happy, and it makes everything in him feel all the more scraped raw.

Everything feels scraped raw ever since the mask was torn from him.

Which is, in its own way, also stupid and agitating because the mask wasn’t torn away from him, the mask was forced on him and he gave it back, he threw it off himself, he wasn’t that mask and he isn’t that mask and he doesn’t need that mask and that mask can stay away, he has a name, it is Zuko, the mask can STAY—

The banked fires of his discomfort finally leap to life one afternoon, when he and Sokka have a moment to sit in the shade of a scraggly tree, watching Toph harangue Aang with a mini-dust storm she gained mastery over frighteningly quickly. Neither of them are choking on the dirt, given the loud shouting, so Sokka and he leave them alone. Instead, Zuko bursts out, “Why do you and Katara keep looking at me.”

In the corner of his eye, he catches Sokka turning his head and looking at him. Before Sokka can speak, he hisses, “Like that, why do you and Katara keep looking at me like that when we talk. What do you want?”

“What are you talking about?” asks Sokka with complete bafflement.

“Is there something on my face?”

“Well—”

“Beyond the obvious.”