Author's Note: So I've seen some fics lately where Zuko's the Avatar, and this is my take on that.  I suppose background is just that Aang froze to death instead of just freezing (sorry Aang),  the Water Avatar was born in the foggy swamp and never knew what she was, and the Earth Avatar died in childhood.  Still, as far as anyone knows, the Avatar disappeared a hundred years ago, and Zuko is scarred and banished as in canon.  This takes place at the same time as in canon, Aang would have been getting out of the ice.

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The ship bucked and groaned with the storm.  His blanket curled up around his neck, Zuko dozed fitfully.

With a great lurch, the ship bounced off an iceberg, and Zuko toppled off his bed.  In that half-second before he hit, he exhaled, and the air hit the floor like a jet.  Before he even had time to think, he found himself rolling safely back onto his bed.

Zuko stared at the insignia on the far wall, momentarily transfixed, and experimentally twisted towards it.  A great gust sent it flapping against the wall, and Zuko closed his eyes in misery.

Author's Note: So the other day, I gave Iroh a really silly drabble.  This counterbalences that.  Poor Iroh; a Dragon's work is never done.

Harmless Old Man

The tea streamed into the porcelain cup, but the man sitting behind wasn’t really there for the tea.  Iroh could always tell which ones were there to gawk at the Dragon of the West, to see their old nightmare gentled and humble and safe.

But that was alright, because he wasn’t really there for the tea either.

The Dai Li trickled back into the city with the multitudes, and the Earth King’s new power crouched unsteadily on his shoulders, restlessly waiting for someone to pluck it away, but no one tried.  No one dared rouse the Dragon of the West.

Teabending

Bumi’s bending was really getting out of hand.

The table lurched between Iroh and Pakku, hurling their tea out of their cups and their pai sho tiles onto the quaking ground.  Desperately, Iroh shoved all of his weight onto it to steady it, but the damage was already done.  “Awww.”

Rolling his eyes, Pakku bent the tea back into the cups.

“You bend tea?”

“I’m a master waterbender; of course I can bend tea!”

“I know, I just never put it together before!”  Suddenly, firebending wasn’t... He wished he was a waterbender.

Until Pakku froze his tea in its cup.

Time Flies

“I learned to bend water in vines at the side of my mother and father,” the young woman held her head high, hands balled into determined fists, “I mastered earthbending when I was seventeen.  The Fire Lord herself taught me.  I am twenty years old, and one element away from becoming a fully realized avatar.  I’m ready.”

The temple elder cocked her head and stared at her sideways, pulling her wizened, scrawny, shriveled body up to cartwheel and flip down to her.  “But do you think you can fly?”

All of her bravado spilled away behind a little girl’s grin.

Author's Note: Oh come on, we all know the next Avatar's going to be from the swamp.  Yes, that temple elder is Ty-Lee, and in my head, the current fire lord for this is Zuko's granddaughter.

Shipper on Deck

“Zuko!”  Toph exclaimed, “You should date Katara!”

Suddenly all of the ways the waterbender could kill him flashed through his mind.  “No!”

“Awww.”

~*~

“Teo, you should date Katara.”

He rolled his wheels backwards quickly.  “Ummm... I don’t think...”

“Coward.”

~*~

“Haru, you have to date Katara.”

“Toph!”  He jumped and whirled around in surprise.  “But there’s this Kyoshi warrior girl-”

She hit him.  “Why!”

~*~

“That’s it!” Toph yelled, and dragged Aang to her, planting a solid kiss squarely on his lips.

“I’m with Katara!” he sprang out of her reach.

“Ugh,” she growled, pounding the wall and shattering it. “I know!”

Author's note: In which Katara is an unlikely Katherine in Toph's production of The Taming of the Shrew.

Disclaimer: If I owned Avatar the Last Airbender, I'd sell it and go back to writing fanfiction. It's a disease.

Summery: After Katara leaves the Northern Water Tribe, Pakku must confront the changes she has wrought.
Pairings: hints of Kanna/Pakku, mostly gen


( Whistling up a Storm )

This is another one of those drabbles I wrote in the gift exchange at atlaland, this time fore suzukiblu.  Her fanfic is seriously brilliant, and you can find it at white_knuckle.  Check it out.

Push and Pull

Yue stood thin and insubstantial in the grim half-light of the spirit world. “I am the moon for my people.”

La’s arms hung limp at his sides. “But you aren’t Tui. You can’t be Tui.”

The ocean spirit was crying, she realized, like a person, and she was the moon spirit, and every thing hurt and itched, and didn’t feel right. “I’m sorry,” she said the words falling flat.

His hand rested on her cheek, face slack with desperation. “I barely know you.”

She kissed him on the forehead and pulled away. “We don’t have to love each other yet.”

Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Harry Potter universe, and am not affiliated with anyone who does. However, J. K. Rowling and her affiliates leave me (and those like me) alone because I don't make any money off these and provide free, if relatively ineffective, advertising.

Summary: Despite James Potter's heroism, Severus Snape does not escape the Shrieking Shack unscathed. When Remus Lupin bites him, Severus has to face a full share in Lupin's secret while whispers of a new Dark Lord grow louder every day.

( Chapter Twelve: Fearful )

A Thousand Faces

“Show no fear,” the Avatar warned, “show no emotion at all, but especially not fear.”  She nodded, her face still as stone, and folded herself on roots of the tree by the turtle duck pond as the sun went down.

Slowly, slowly she slipped into the spirit world, Iroh and Aang’s descriptions walking beside her.

At Koh’s tree, she waited, and when he came, he was smiling, but though her face was heavy, it did not crack.

With the sunrise, Mai walked out of the spirit world with every face Koh had ever stolen, and Zuko’s cradled in her hands.

Author's Note: At first, I didn't know why Mai was in the spirit world facing Koh, but I grew up listening to those stories like Tam Lin where the heroine rescues her lover from the faery queen and I guess I absorbed some of it.   All of a sudden, this went from a very silly drabble about how Mai would own Koh's sorry ass with her stony expression, to something a lot more serious and I hope, kind of sweet.  I like giving post-war Fire Lady Mai moments of heroic badassness.  Keeps her life from being boring.

Author's Note: After all that running around after and then with the avatar and his brave companions, I can just see Zuko coming home and being really genre savy.  This is item number one on the evil overlord list, actually...  I don't know, it feels like he's channeling Gen from Megan Whalen Turner's books here, playing innocent and stupid most of the time, and then WHAM, oh yeah, that's why he's Fire Lord.


Form Over Function

“Tell me,” Zuko asked, “Why do Fire Nation troops wear face masks or helmets with visors?”

“They protect their faces and intimidate our enemies,” one of his generals replied, suppressing a sigh.

The new Fire Lord’s eyes flicked over the tax reports on the table and then narrowed on the general.  “Really?  Because I always thought they just made it easy for people to infiltrate our armed forces.”

The general flinched, finding himself missing Princess Azula.  No one ever forgot she was terrifying.  “My lord, I don’t...”

“It was really useful during the war," he deadpanned.  “Thanks, by the way.”

Walls

The steps were cold under her hands as she walked upwards, and at the top, she bent backwards until her feet touched the landing and bounced up to stand on them instead.  “Hi Azula!”

Azula shifted her heavy robes and glared at the blank wall beside her.  “Leave.”

Up there, it was cold even in the summer, and her armor felt like ice, pressing in on her.  “Sorry.”  The heat from Azula’s flames licked at her as they scorched past.  “I won’t tell the guards if you don’t do that again.”

Azula had stone and metal pressing in on her.



Coming and Going

Azula dressed in robes, and when she was angry, her nails bit into and cut the silk.  “You’re never here when I want you, and you’re always here when I don’t!”  Flames gathered, but she squashed them.  She didn’t want the guards to come.

“I didn’t think you ever wanted me here.”

“Don’t be stupid, Zuzu.”  Him there without her... That would have been nice.

The door didn’t open or close, but all that was there with her was empty room.  Not being able to tell him when to leave and when to stay was the worst thing about it.



Hush

When Azula opened her eyes, her mother hovered against the stone wall like a smear of bright blood.  Azula’s hands clung to her arms so hard rivulets of blood joined her mother on the stone.  “NO!” She howled, “You’re not supposed to be here; you’re not real!”

“Azula,” she whispered, moving close and running her fingers through her daughter’s mangled hair, “It’s alright now. I’m really-”

“No you’re not; I know you’re not!”  Her eyes slammed shut and she clutched her arms tighter.

Unwillingly, Ursa slipped out and locked the door behind her, her footfalls echoing dully on the stairs.

Author's Note: I really like the thought of Ty Lee being an airbender and not knowing it.  It's an idea I plan to play with in the future.  It's not supposed to be Aang/Ty Lee, but I guess it kind of gives that vibe.

Pointing the Way

The hair had finally started to grow back in a soft fuzz.  Every morning, she shaved all the way back to the middle of her skull, displaying her still healing arrow gracefully.

She rested her chin on her arms innocently as the needles bit into the skin over her spine, leaving their ink behind.

“It’s all your fault, you know,” and he remembered the way she had flinched and clenched her teeth when those same needles moved over her skull and between her eyes.  “No one’s impressed with my acrobatics anymore.”

“I’m still impressed,” Aang told her, re-inking his needles.

Author's Note: This came out more incoherent than I was hoping for.  In case you can't tell what's going on, Azula broke out, snuck into thee palace, and confronted Mai and Ty Lee.  In the ensuing fight, Azula killed Mai, and Ty Lee killed Azula.

Smoke

“I didn’t betray Azula for you,” she said, hunched over her tea, not looking like herself at all.  “Mai did, but I didn’t.  I did it for Mai.”

Zuko’s hand was tight around his daughter’s as she pointed to the body on the pyre, black lightening burns still visible on its flesh before the fire consumed it.  “That’s not Mommy,” she insisted, “that can’t be Mommy.”  He pulled her close.

Hidden away was another pyre where Azula burned with a snapped neck courtesy of Ty Lee.

“Which time?”

She tried to giggle.

“Thank you for coming.” he mumbled.

“Which time?”

I wrote this for himhilien in the gift exchange at atlaland because I'm accustomed to giving other people gifts on my birthday. Yes, that is an intentional Star Wars quote as the title.

More Powerful Than You Could Possibly Imagine

“Stop pacing, some of us are trying to feel better.”

“You wouldn’t feel sick in the first place if you hadn’t eaten all those cakes, Sokka.”

“Katara!”

But Katara didn’t even slow down. “I just don’t understand why Toph would want to go home right away. It’s so... sudden.”

“Maybe she thinks that now that she helped Aang win, her parents will realize she’s not weak and fragile,” Zuko muttered.

Meanwhile, trapped in the carriage that would take him to the family of his new body, the Melon Lord stared out of her sightless eyes and planned his ultimate victory.

So this is my entrance into the Avatar the Last Airbender fandom as a writer, and therefore there are now two fandoms I'm active in. I wrote this for beckyh2112 in the gift exchange at atlaland where, we the proud Fire Nation are getting our asses handed to us by everyone.

Children’s Stories

“And then the brave Fire Lady Mai turned on the wicked Princess Azula, high above the Boiling Rock...” The storyteller paused for a moment for the gasps of the children around him.

Inside her palanquin, Mai closed her ears to it as she passed, something stinging at the corners of her eyes.  She thought about the way it felt up there.

And she thought about the Fire Nation Royal Academy for Girls and about the magnetic, frightened, awkward girl she met her second year in.  She signaled her bearers to take her back to the palace as quickly as possible.

I have a Netflix account, I have a Netflix account!  Yeah, sorry, I’ve been mainlining TV shows, contrary to every lecture my English teachers have ever dried to drum into my thick head as I pretended I wasn’t reading under my desk.  My brain is turning to jelly, and my social, (and, er and blogging) judgement has poured out of my ears, so I have a Netflix account, I have a Netflix account!

Anyway, because all the television I’m watching is obviously rotting my brain, my dear sweet (terrifying) grammy dragged me to the local museum to... watch... A movie...  There’s something wrong with this.

GRAMMY: Let's go see this IMAX movie tomorrow about Egyptian mummification! You'll learn something. It's not like you've ever embalmed anything.
FISH: Er... yes I have.
GRAMMY: Not on purpose, right?
FISH: Er....
GRAMMY: Oh my God!

In 6th grade we mummified cornish game hens and put their embalmed organs in canopic jars, and built them clay sarcophagi, (I built the canopic jars too) and anointed them with all the symbolic spices and oil, and wrapped them, and buried them.  So in a few thousand years, when they dig up my schools, the archaeologists are going to think we worshiped demented shrunken chickens.

The best part was, one of our group wore a swim cap (instead of shaving her head) and a fake leopard skin toga and I wore a plastic Anubis mask.

So after I shocked and appalled my grandmother with the depths of my historical weirdness, I got into a religious debate with her.  Bad idea.  She’s an Atheist, and she’s smarter than I am.  She likes to harp on the fact that religions are patriarchal, and I’m a feminist, and I know better.  Telling her I’m not a biblical literalist doesn’t seem to work, nor does saying religions sprang from patriarchal societies, and so did museums, so instead I managed to accidentally convince her that I have beliefs stranger than she ever imagined.  Oops.  Or cool... Still trying to decide.

FISH: I'm a pantheist, and so since the universe has all kinds, my God is pan-gender.
GRAMMY: Iron and teflon can't perform gender, dear, and don’t even get me started on aluminum.  Is God pot-gender too?
Fish: Now you're just having me on!
GRAMMY: A bunch of your mom's friends were pot-sexual. Is that the same?
FISH: Grammy!
GRAMMY: I need to have some fun in the twilight of my life! You would deprive me even of that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Disclaimer: JKR doesn't mind fanfiction writers I hear.

A Matter of Appearances

Black Sentenced to Azkaban The newspaper headline proclaimed, and Walburga scanned the first line, chest fluttering.  Notorious mass murderer Sirius Black was sentenced to life in the Wizarding prison yesterday evening...

Her firstborn was a credit to the family after all.

She pulled out a peace of parchment and wrote the letter needed to re-inherit her son.

With both her sons disgraced, for the right reasons, she could bear her own disgrace and wile away her remaining years knowing she raised them well.

And even if Sirius couldn't touch a knut of it in Azkaban, it was the appearances that mattered.

So the last book I wrote about hasn't even been released yet, and now I write about books first published in 1981, 1982, and 1984 whose author is already dead?  Anyone have whiplash yet?

These three were part of my score at the half off YA fantasy at my local independent bookstore, though strictly speaking, these books aren't fantasy, speculative fiction, yes, but not fantasy.  Set in the fictional country of Westmark that resembles a late seventeenth century Western European power, the Westmark trilogy stars Theo and Mickle, a printer's assistant, and a beggar with profound vocal gifts.  After Theo and his master print a pamphlet without the Chief Minister's stamp of approval and Theo's master die for it, he flees his small town and meets up with a band of showmen scoundrels and Mickle.  But when Mickle makes a name for herself and the band as an oracle who can raise the dead, they must foil the chief minister and save the king, or die for failing.

( Take your nobles who flog their servants, gouge their tenants, or judges who send some wretch to be hanged- they're honest as the day is long. Any scoundrel can be honest. )

Oh Mr. Alexander, why are you dead, if you weren't, I'd kiss you, but your family and the law might object now.

Writing my current chapterfic, Children of Mars, is becoming a didactic exercise.  The writing itself is as much a pleasure as ever, and has even gained a sense of catharsis, but when it comes time to post, I want to just save it to my computer and never let one more idiot reader anywhere near it.  Now I know not all of you dear readers are idiots, and one of the things I like best about writing fanfiction is the social framework and critique of fandom (yeah, I write for the comments, such a bad girl) and I have never felt this way about posting a fic before.  Before I have always written about able-bodied characters.

My writing Snape with a disability along with werewolfism is part protest at the way characters with disabilities were portrayed in the books I read as a child and part personal expression of myself as a writer with disabilities.  We don’t have the same disability, in the story Snape uses crutches, whereas I’m oxygen dependent and have an immune disease, but we share a certain status as people with disabilities, or (good God) disabled people.  It’s wonderful, and freeing, and it makes me feel so much better after bad days.

But once I post, it seems like so many of the reviews I receive are “teachable moments” and that’s not so wonderful.

Some of you have been saying you can’t wrap your heads around Snape as disabled.  That isn’t because of anything inherent in either Snape as a character or disability, but in cultural narratives that paint people with disabilities as either weak, or more insidiously as plucky, happy symbols of Good, like the damsel in distress in action movies, not a character so much as an object.  Snape will never be a tragic, passive, stoic cripple (a word that I see a lot in reviews and makes me throw up a little in my mouth each time).  He will never be helpless.  He is and always will be a snarky git.  So many of the reviews talk about how horrible all of the other characters are to him.  Well, he’s horrible to them.  Besides which if anyone, even Lily, especially Lily, were suddenly to treat him like a helpless incompetent child who can’t protect himself or do a thing on his own, he would hex them all into oblivion.  When people do that to me, I wish I could.

When I was a kid, books about people with disabilities seemed to end one of two ways.  Either the pure, good, tragic cripple died, or the pure, good, tragic cripple was cured.  Okay, there were also villains whose disabilities were a symbolic sign of their inner corruption, but I’m not even going to touch that one.  Such endings are incredibly disheartening for me, growing up, because I didn’t want to die, and I was never going to be miraculously cured.  I had to carve out a happy ending of my own that included my disability.   For those of you who keep saying you want Snape’s leg repaired at the end, you are tapping into that same disenfranchising cultural narrative.  Stop it.  Stop it now.  Don’t make me get out my squirt bottle of wrathful smiting.  Whatever ending I write (and I will spoil this, if nothing else) Snape and his disability will be around at the end, along with their happy ending.

One thing I didn’t mention about the perfect tragic cripple trope is that they are always portrayed as lacking any sort of sexuality at all.  They neither have sexual feelings or are appropriate objects of desire for other characters.  What. The. Hell.  Okay, okay, there is one type of character with disabilities allowed to lust, the disabled villain.  Of course their sexuality is always portrayed as deviant, and threatening, and further sign of their evil.  Now, no one has sent me a comment with this bit of fail in it, as Snape hasn’t done any more than engage in some canon unrequited Lily love, but I’m waiting,  When the situation calls for them, I’ll get these too.  I have no doubt.

All of this makes me feel even more queasy as I write this, and I get no catharsis or enjoyment from it.  It shouldn’t be my job, but because I will continue writing characters with disabilities, not just in fic but in original works as well, I have put myself in the position of teaching by example, so for my own peace of mind, I must also teach directly.  I’m sure those characters will get similar sorts of reviews, sometimes, if I’m lucky, from reviewers and writers I respect.  When I send my stories out into the world, the knowledge that people will read my characters differently because of their disabilities will always be there.

Snape is not tragic.  He is not a poor crippled boy to be protected and treated nicely by the noble heroes.  He is the hero.  He will fight against and work with his disability, but ultimately, he will do it on his own, like all of us must do at the end of the day.

I’m sure I didn’t cover everything in this post, and a lot of you will be rolling your eyes going “yes, we know all this” and  this is really basic realize people with disabilities are people stuff, but I keep getting comments where I have to reiterate this.  All of you dear readers who do know all this, thank you, and no fear all, I’m still writing Children of Mars and other fanfics.

This little book, with its unassuming solid purple cover is my first bound galley. I use it as a personal justification for trawling other people's friends lists, because that's how I ran across someone giving away their copy (thanks tinachristopher !). The purpleness, the reading it five months before publicationness, all this makes me happy.

What makes me less happy is that this was another one of those reviews I had finished and all ready to post when my computer crashed.

Stop it, Fish, it's not the book's fault.

Nya's little sister is a healer. She can take pain and illness out of a person and dump it into pynvium, a metal that can't hurt like people. Her sister's got a cushy position as a League apprentice, but in the aftermath of the Baseeri conquest, Nya's getting by on odd jobs and petty theft, because while she can take pain out of people, she can't put it anywhere but another person, and they can hurt.

But when League apprentices start disappearing, Nya’s strange, useless talents become the key to getting her sister, and maybe even her nation, back.

( This is where usually I have a snappy quote, but it explicitly states no quoting. )

The Pain Merchants, titled The Shifter in the US (Which is really sad, because The Pain Merchants is a way cooler title), book one of The Healing Wars, comes out October 6, but I got to read it all the way back in May. Suckers. Oh well, it means I have longer to wait for the sequels.

Janice Hardy can be found at her blog, The Healing Wars.