Hhhmmm… I hope my interpretation is to your liking. Most of the AUs I’ve talked about and know that are similar to this one are Music Professor AUs which are fun right??? The music professor headcanons are borrowed/inspired by/built off of @firelord-frowny‘s music AUs <3
1. Zuko is difficult. His father is the head of the music department/director of a prestigious university’s orchestra, and Zuko wants nothing to do with instruments and how to use them… He’s interested in drawing and painting and the visual arts. And Ozai tries his best to put up with that… But as he gets older, Zuko actually becomes pretty good at drawing and Ozai refuses to admit that Zuko is good at that only because he doesn’t see it getting Zuko anywhere in the world.After winning awards in local and school art shows in the last years of high school, Zuko finally convinces his father to let him go to art school, telling him about all the things he could do after he earned a diploma in art. So after telling Zuko to apply for as many scholarships as he could, Ozai decided to pay for Zuko’s tuition at Cal Arts…. However…. Zuko was not fit to be a college student… Didn’t like how the teachers taught their classes, didn’t get enough sleep, or eat enough food, showed up late or he didn’t even show up to classes. So he dropped out after a year and Ozai was pissed. Pissed that he had to spend that money on a school Zuko would drop out of. They have a falling out and Zuko is kicked out.Not having anywhere to go… Iroh offers to take him and Zuko moves to New York with his uncle until he can find a way to make enough to live on his own. He gets a job working as a waiter in a bar next to a tattoo studio. One night after his shift, he passes the owner of the tattoo studio taking a smoke break out back, his arms are all decorated with fancy art and Zuko likes art… So he asks, and they have a long conversation. He finds out the owner is a retired lieutenant from the Navy, and he’s rather grumpy and has no problem speaking his mind. His name is Jee. He also finds out that he’s open to an apprenticeship and the very next day Zuko comes back with a portfolio of his own art and the lieutenant sees potential and accepts to take Zuko as his apprentice, but that doesn’t mean he has to like the kid. Zuko realizes he’s quite happy carving art into people’s skin, and that he didn’t need to earn a piece of paper that said he went to X school of arts to be successful.
2. Azula, quite opposite of Zuko, was always rather gifted. She was playing the violin quite well before she was in her double digits, she was a prodigy. When it came time for college, she of course got a full ride scholarship to the university where her father headed the music department at. Even as a freshman, she’d get first chair and the position of concert master. Anyone who dared to even dream to have her spot would be squashed out by Azula’s sheer determination to be the best, to be perfect… And really everyone thought the reason she was picked for concert master was because she was the director’s daughter, but even if you did take that factor of relation away, she was actually that good to always get first seat when auditions were held. The day she loses her seat to someone else is the day she falls apart, and at home that night, she would confront her father about picking someone else and he would simply reply with ‘Because she performed better than you did.’ She loses her composure for one night and by the next day she’s trying to better her skills to reclaim her seat by the next audition.
3. Aang is aged up a little to be a young professor. He teaches at a liberal arts college and specializes in social studies, more specifically human sexuality and lgbtq studies. He’s the kind of teacher that comes in late to his own class with a bottle of homemade fruit/veggie/herb beverage that everyone wonders about. He’s the kind of professor that hands out cute plushie versions of STI microbes during the STI unit in his human sexuality class. He’s the kind of professor that you can talk to about anything at anytime and he won’t be fazed, he’s a friend. He’s the kind of professor that doesn’t take attendance and has no penalty set for missing classes, because he understands that life happens and college just isn’t for everyone. People who take his class seriously and show up and really care about their education and ask a lot of questions are his favorite kind of students. He doesn’t have exams or quizzes because he doesn’t believe those actually measure a person’s intelligence on a subject. Instead he assigns short essay/journal assignments requiring minimal amount of research on something vaguely relating to the current topic in the class and honestly he just likes reading the students’ thoughts… In fact he encourages creativity so much that he forbids students from writing an essay or research paper for their final projects.
4. Sokka wanted to join the Marine Corps right after he graduated high school. That doesn’t happen because right at the end of junior year, he discovers that he’s been colorblind the entire time… He’s absolutely crushed by this development. Now he has to go to college right away uuUUUgghhh. He goes to a two year school to get his gen eds out of the way and then goes on to a state university and pursues a study in engineering. He’s actually incredibly book smart, and complex math comes easy to him. This college thing isn’t as bad as he thought it would be he thinks. He’s also the kind of student that hosts legendary parties in his apartment, and he spends a lot of his weekends partying, but still manages to do well and get his homework done on time.During one of his parties, he meets somebody(Whoever you want it to be because I honestly don’t know) and he pretty much hits it off quite well with them and before long they’re in a relationship and then living together, and honestly its so bizarre to him how different his life might be if he weren’t colorblind.
5. Katara goes to med school and that’s like… A six year ordeal, and she appears to get through it so gracefully. She does want to be the woman to cure cancer after all, especially since that’s what took her mother away from her :c Though the med school she wants to go to is far away from the rest of her family and they’re really concerned about her especially when she seems so tired when they talk to her and when she doesn’t come home for family events because school work has her weighed down… She really doesn’t get through at as gracefully as her peers see her do, because she ends up really homesick in the end. She goes home, and starts small, working at a clinic close to home and she’s quite humble and happy with that, she just needs a breather.
firelord-frowny replied to your post “Since it’s April the first, I wanna WRITE some short (maybe paragraph…”
a prompt: Ozai and Zuko visit the aquarium.
Here you go @firelord-frowny ^^ hope you like, it ended up being a bit longer than a few paragraphs.. sorry if there are errors in it i missed!
They were trying to get along, after all these years, but it wasn’t going very well as it always did. They were in the middle of an argument about the early hour that Zuko had come home during that morning. …Maybe you wouldn’t feel like shit if you didn’t spend your nights drinking your liver shot… Says the guy who has drank his liver shot already in his life… Thats when Ursa pushed… no she ‘hollered’ her son and her ‘on-and-off’ husband out the door and sent them on a mission to go find some place else to disrupt with their consistent bickering, and to stay out until they ran dry of things to argue about.
They ended up going to that new aquarium downtown that was getting apparently stellar reviews, the one that had critters from the ocean and the fresh water. There wasn’t much to do on an Autumn Sunday mid-morning to begin with. After figuring that out, the rest of the trip across town was pretty quiet. Zuko’s headache rendered him mostly unable to keep a normal small talk going, and Ozai wasn’t much for talk any way.
The father and son got to the aquarium along the river and right away there were too many people for their liking, even on their way inside walking from the parking lot, they noticed this. They got through the double doors and Ozai automatically made his way to the ticket kiosk and got in line. Zuko stood by and waited, his hands were resting in the front pocket of his sweatshirt, his eyes wandered around the lobby, spotting all the things that weren’t people- The decorative vines coiling around the thick wooden columns that held up the walkways full of people the next floor up. They were all contributing to a collaborative chattering white noise which echoed through the Atrium. Trying again to pick out the things that weren’t people, he looked to the upper space of the Atrium to the wide skylights. Blank, gray overcast, it wasn’t people at least.
Ozai finally bought the wristband tickets, and walked back over to Zuko, dodging the crowd. He bumped Zuko out of his daze of staring up at the overcast, and handed him one of the purple wristbands made of paper. They spent a few extra minutes in the lobby before making their way into the exhibits, all because Zuko couldn’t figure out how to get the wristband hooked and needed Ozai’s help.
“…I figure you would know how to get these things around your wrist after all your late night outings…” Ozai muttered, annoyed, close to his son’s face. Zuko responded with an eye roll and a “Whatever man.”
First were the sea shore and reef exhibits, which were glass tunnels arching over the walk way. The blue behind the glass was full of vibrant schools of fish and vivid clumps of coral. Ozai was enthralled with the mocked palette of the ocean’s ecosystems, silver mackerel swarmed past the glass,color-changing eels peaked out of their hidey-holes and ducked back in at bolting speeds, blue and yellow tangs fluttered above their respective reefs. Zuko had to whisper his father’s name if he stood in one spot to long staring at the plethora of colors on the other side of the glass. Zuko got the point of it and just wanted to push further on down the tunnel, and had to urge Ozai to keep moving with him.
Today was about the fish, not about what he did last night, so he was trying to enjoy himself and not trying to converse with Ozai too much. They walked further down the way and approached a part of the tunnel that transformed into a larger space, or a large glass bubble that held people more like. Quickly, that bubble felt closer to a glass barrier when the silhouettes of sharks passed over them as the two entered the space. They trotted over to an open spot between crowds to peer up at the enormous creatures, that were, surprisingly, just large fish in the end. But those fish had rows of razor sharp teeth and streamlined bodies with sharp edges, their masses made of muscle. Hammerheads and bulls, mako and reef sharks, they hardly seemed to care about all the human eyes gawking at them from the other side of the glass bubble.
“That’s metal.” Zuko said, as fascinated as he could be despite his fading hangover.
“Powerful.” Ozai corrected him, with a small smirk.
The crowd became too dense around them, and the two moved on from their fascination with the sharks, and went on into the next room after the bubble. It was barely lit, and had smaller more assorted tanks, tall square tanks along the walls and cylinder shaped tanks in the center. They started at the first cylinder tank, which contained seahorses. Zuko immediately adored the tiny, dancing and bobbing, almost alien like animals, they were clumsy and had to hold onto the plants extending from the bottom of the tank using their curly tails for support. Ozai just shrugged at the pitiful tiny creatures.
Zuko spoke up. “Did you know the male seahorses are the ones that get pregnant?” turning his head to Ozai.
“Uh… No… That’s… pretty bizarre.” Ozai responded.
Zuko turned his face back to the glass and leaned in a little closer, “I support you, tiny water dads.” he cooed at the seahorses. Ozai shook his head and snickered at that.
They moved on to the other cylinder shaped tanks, one supposedly had an octopus in it which neither Ozai or Zuko could find, and the next tank had spider crabs which Ozai was immediately disinterested in, so they pressed on to the next section of the aquarium which were the fresh water exhibits. They watched the fluffy otters play, and the fresh water crocodiles do the complete opposite, they mistook the snapping turtles for rocks a couple times, and made a few bets on which snail would get to the top of the glass in its tank first, but were eventually too bored to wait and see who the winner would be.
On the other end of the room was an enclosure with the walls of it coming up to about their waists, inside was an imitation of a pond and what you’d find in it. Some turtles and small frogs and lily pads. Small patches of dry surfaces the semi-aquatic creatures could rest on. There were koi fish floating patiently at the bottom of the pond, waiting to be fed by the guests. Most importantly, there was a family of ducks. A couple and their two ducklings. The couple bobbed in the water and quietly honked to each other like they were discussing something important, while their ducklings squeaked and wiggled and paddled their little webbed feet as hard as they could to keep up with their parents.
Zuko leaned over the railing, almost as far as he could to get a better look at the koi fish looking back up at him as if it expected him to toss it some food pellets. They were locked in an intense stare down. Ozai kept his attention on the family of ducks bobbing across the pond. The bigger of the ducklings began nipping at it’s sibling and the smaller one squeaked in distress and paddled away to the other side of their mother, the larger sibling pursued it. The mother dipped her head in between her feuding offspring, and nudged the perpetrating duckling with her beak. Ozai almost heard his own wife saying ‘Knock it off.’ when she was trying to keep their own children settled down, and he chuckled at that thought.
Apparently the father duck didn’t like the sound of Ozai’s laugh because he launched himself out the water at Ozai’s face, squawking and wings flapping. Water splashed, Ozai yelped, the father duck honked in earnest. Ozai ran backwards at the sudden force of feathers attacking him and tripped, falling on his rear end, while the duck snapped his beak at Ozai’s nose and ears and eyes. It rapped its feet against his chest, and slapped its wings around his face. Ozai cussed and hollered, trying to pull the attacking creature off of him. It got a hold of his eye lid and he shrieked, the commotion him and the duck were creating was certainly the center of attention at that point. Zuko was pulled away from his stare down by the uproar and rushed to his panicking father, struggling on the floor with a face full of feathered fury. Zuko rudely pushed the man trying to assist his father off to the side because he was taking too long. He kneeled down and grabbed the duck’s legs, pulling the beast away from Ozai, and carried it back to the artificial pond, to it’s family. The duck protested with honks and flapping wings and Zuko made it to the edge of the pond and gave the animal a good toss back into the enclosure. It smacked the surface of the water creating a splash, regained his balance after a few more flaps and casually swam back to his family like nothing had happened.
Some of the aquarium staff finally arrived at the scene, and one of the female workers offered her hand down to Ozai and she helped him back on his feet. Ozai, his hair ruffled and no longer perfectly straight, with bruises and red marks on his face, looked at the woman and politely and quickly thanked her before stomping off to the edge of the pond. Zuko turned around to his father making his way to the enclosure, probably seeking his vengeance on the duck by hollering at it from the railing. His son stood in his path to the pond, his hands up with an awkward smirk on his face.
Ozai halted in front of his son, “Zuko, I’m ready to leave.”
“Huh, I think I am too.” Zuko grinned.
As compensation for their troubles, the aquarium management gave them a full refund, and Zuko asked for a duckling plushy he saw at one of the kiosks along their way through the exhibits, which they graciously gave to him. Then the father and son exited the establishment and made their way back to the car, Ozai sulking and Zuko held the plushy at his side, and watched his feet step one in front of the other as he followed his father, replaying the event in his mind. Ozai tapped the unlock button on his car key, and the locks snapped open in the doors. They opened their doors and maneuvered into their seats. Ozai fiddled with the keys and put them into the ignition and turned the car on… And then he let out a tired sigh with a tinge of annoyance, and the two sat there in silence for an awkward minute. Zuko shifted his eyes back and forth between the plushy and Ozai who had his hands resting on each side of the steering wheel and his head between them. Ozai closed his eyes and shook his head from side to side and let out a throaty snort that turned into a low chuckle and looked back up at Zuko holding his duck plushy to his chest and Zuko began to giggle along with him.
“I guess ducks don’t like either of us.” Zuko confirmed.
“I guess not, my god!… Ozai agreed. Zuko grinned at his father.
“Lets grab a bite, preferably somewhere people won’t care too much to see my duck battle scars.” Ozai suggested.
“Right.” Zuko answered, while turning his head to look out through the windshield. Their mission assigned to them by Ursa was accomplished, for now.
