#smashed your bones

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Also, my brain’s still broken over the fact that rice wasn’t always a staple crop across all of China - fucking duh, that’s a large landmass with differences in geography and climate across different regions - and now I want to do something about this in “no heaven” because wheat is a thing. More so than rice in plenty of places. And barley and rye and millet.

Fuck, I still need to sit down and finish going utterly insane over what the water systems of ATLA could look like. In unreasonable detail. Rivers and floodplains are too damn important, especially if I’m going to set everything on fire in the Yue & Zuko fic.

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I am such a doofus, why have I never talked about the impact of refrigeration on the production, transportation, and distribution of food in ATLA. They clearly know how to create ice boxes, it’s right there in the boiling rock, how did I—

Does the Fire Nation also know how to can goods? Does the army get rations in cans? Are there roads built in the colonies over the course of the war that are focused primarily on the transport of supplies? What are the logistics of refrigerated transportation?

Please for the love of god, what is going on with transportation logistics in ATLA where you have armored tanks that incorporate gyroscopes at the same time as carriages pulled by animals. How tight of a fist does the Fire Nation military have clenched around its tech, good grief.

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It’s too bad that the Yue & Zuko fic heavily depends on the Earth Kingdom going through a once in centuries terrible drought, because I really want to talk about floodwater management in places like Ba Sing Se.

Well, it’s not like everyone isn’t going to have problems when the rains come back to a parched and scorched land. But those events would be reserved for a nonexistent sequel.

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Was going through the post drafts attached to this account and found these excerpts from “War: How Conflict Shaped Us” by Margaret MacMillan that I bookmarked years ago for the Yue & Zuko WIP. Their vibes are also decently relevant for “no heaven” and ghost!Zuko.

Chapter 5:

“The Duke of Wellington called his soldiers, who even after the French Revolution were recruited in the old way, ‘the scum of the earth.’ And to the earth they returned, their graves unmarked. When the peace came, many British proudly wore dentures made of ‘Waterloo teeth,’ taken by scavengers from the dead on the battlefield. In 1822 a London newspaper carried an item about how the battlefields from the Napoleonic Wars had been scored for their bones, men’s and animals’ alike. Millions of bushels had been shipped to Hull and then sent on to the bone grinders in Yorkshire, where powerful steam-powered machines had reduced them to powder. ‘In this condition they are sold to farmers to manure their lands.’”

Chapter 8: 

“We show ourselves,” said a Japanese diplomat, “at least your equals in scientific butchery and at once are admitted to your council tables as civilized men.” 

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Random scene from the firestorm fic to quiet the banshee screaming in my brain

Zuko looks at this tiny monk with his light blue arrows inked over his head and hands, his wide eyes filled with gray, and the heavy weight upon his thin shoulders and Zuko feels so sick with anger and resentment at the unfairness of the world he could throw up from it. He croaks out, “Right, I’m just going to…not be here for a bit.”

Yue sends him a concerned glance. “Zuko?”

“I can’t.” He shakes his head and all his emotions overflow and topple his composure over a cliff to shatter into a million pieces. “I can’t.” As if it’ll clarify anything, he waves his hand generally through the air, then spins on his heels and sprints away.

Later, when he’s freezing his fingers off and fairly certain his nose disappeared after half an hour of staring at blinding blue-white everywhere, Zuko hears Yue’s gait approaching behind him, and he says without looking over his shoulder, “I don’t actually blame him for everything. He’s, like, eight.”

“Twelve, be nice,” she admonishes as she sits beside him.

“Twelve, that’s so much better,” he says sarcastically, then glances over at her and nearly falls over.

The clothing they wore in the Earth Kingdom never fit either of them, not just in terms of cut or cheap scratchy material. The lime yellows and grass green and dirt brown kept slashing at his comfort like a war axe, and he grit his teeth and dealt with like the same way he dealt with the off smelling water and the stomach turning spices.

Finally seeing Yue in Water Tribe blues for the first time, Zuko chokes out, “That looks good on you.”

She laughs lightly. “Thanks. Katara let me borrow some of her clothing. Sokka nearly ran into a wall.”

Reeling and probably suffering from frostbite, Zuko says, “Do I need to punch him for you?”

“Be nice,” she repeats, “I think he’s cute.”

“Cute? Him?” Zuko squawks.

[marginal-notes]

I want to talk to someone about this but I don’t have anyone really, so here’s a sneak peak at a longer work I’m excited to get to soon.