attackfish

Festival of Lights

2009-12-19T01:38:00Z

Tonight is the last night of Hanukkah, and at this time of year, at this odd unimportant footnote in the Jewish ceremonial calender that gets so much press, I feel an obligation to say something Jewish, whatever that means. You’d think I’d pick Yom Kippur, the most important Jewish holiday from a religious standpoint, or Passover, the great holiday of Jewish identity and the struggle for freedom. If any holiday was made for activism, that one is. I don’t even like what Hanukkah stands for. It stands for the punishment of crypto-Jews, fanaticism, and a pure, orthodox forced compliance with Jewish law. It stands for two equally intolerant sides in a war fighting until one gets its way. I prefer to ignore all that in favor of the lights and chasing away the darkness, and spending time at the synagogue with other Jews.

There’s something magical about being at the synagogue, even when I’m not there for learning or services, or anything particularly meaningful. Everyone I talk to there is going to be Jewish. These are people who in this at least are like me. I don’t have to constantly worry that someone there is going to say something stupid about how much Christianity and Judaism have in common and then list something that Jews don’t believe. I don’t have to smile as another person assumes I’m Christian or treats me like a senile grandparent when they find out I’m not. It’s very restful.

This time of year, I feel the most Jewish. It’s not Hanukkah that makes me feel this way, but Christmas. This time of year, every time I walk out of my house or turn on the television, or open my mail, I’m bombarded with reminders that I don’t belong. I’m reminded that I’m different, and all of a sudden, I start to need that restful presence of other Jews.

Most of the year, it’s occasional surprise reminders, little things, sometimes offensive, sometimes not, but this time of year, it’s constant. Everyone’s whipped into a frenzy over a holiday I don’t celebrate, a holiday that in the United States is more a mass cultural event than an expression of religious devotion.

I know the words to all of the popular Christmas carols, and a lot of unpopular ones as well. I know every detail of how Christmas is celebrated in most American homes, and all of the local customs of New Mexico, where I live. I know the stories and history behind most of these customs as well. I have to. The information is thrown at me. But no one has to know my celebrations or have any real idea of the stories behind my holiday.

There’s nothing wrong with this. My feelings of profound isolation aren’t the fault of anyone’s bad behavior, and I’m not asking, or even wishing this mass celebration would go away. Culture is about community, about a shared way of believing and acting. Otherwise, it isn’t culture; it’s personal quirks, and in a country where almost everyone is either Christian or the product of a Christian cultural background, it’s right and good that Christian holidays should be celebrated in this exuberant public manner.

But the reason Hanukkah is celebrated the way it is now, in the United States is that on some level, we Jews, as a community want to be more like the gentiles, to tie ourselves tighter into this culture in which we find ourselves, to feel a little less foreign in our homelands.

When I hear WASPs say they have no culture (usually as a sulky response to being told they’re not allowed to play with someone else’s culture) I wonder what they think I’m emulating then. If decorating in a certain way, singing proscribed songs, sharing the same stories, eating holiday foods, and turning everything inside out for a shared holiday isn’t culture, I don’t know what is. But all of this is invisible, because it’s “normal”. It’s what “everyone” does, so when I don’t, I’m obviously not normal, but “exotic”.

Except when I’m not exotic, I’m just a grinch. Even when my culture, my religion is used, they say this. The church that hosts the twelve step meeting for which I babysit has a star of David for the Magi to follow because “Just as the star led the way for the Magi to the baby Jesus, Judaism led the way to Christianity”. That’s what they think of my religion. I’m sure they’re trying to be inclusive, but really, they can’t figure out what to do with the idiot Jews who haven’t gotten on board with the whole Jesus business like they were supposed to. But when I say something, I’m the one being offensive. I’m the one ruining the fun. It makes me wonder about the sanity of people who honestly think there’s a war against Christmas. They must really think their opponents are ineffective. Don’t they notice the constant shaming of people who don’t celebrate Christmas? Of course they don’t; they’re not being shamed. Don’t they notice the constant barrage of Christmas everything?

I guess not.

I feel most Jewish right now, because I feel least gentile. It’s no one’s fault, no one’s to blame, but please forgive me if I seem a bit sullen, and retreat to the synagogue, and don’t invite you over for latkes.

A Girl of her People

2009-12-14T05:50:02Z

There’s a little blowup right now in certain parts of the Jewish community, and what are minor barely religious holidays of small segments of the population for except airing those small segments’ dirty laundry for the rest of the world to see?

Anyway, the commotion is about the new American Girl doll, Rebecca Rubin, the Jewish doll. According to segments of the Jewish community, she doesn’t look Jewish enough because of her light eyes and light wavy hair.

Judaism is an odd thing, being part religion, part community, and part ethnicity. Just the other day, when a fellow Jew realized I was Jewish, she greeted me as a cousin, not just as a coreligionist. And most people hold in their heads a picture of what Jews are supposed to look like. For many people, including many jews who have internalized the stereotype, this picture includes dark curly hair, olive skin, dark eyes, and a big hooked nose.

I’m not about to deny the power of this picture. When I wanted to create a character for a novel who would be “Jewish” (I use the quotations because it’s a secondary world fantasy novel) I even invoked this deliberately, giving her dark curly hair, and a hooked nose. Nor am I going to deny that aspects of this stereotype have been used to stigmatize Jews in the past. The racialization of Judaism is an ugly thing.

However, while being Jewish is partly an ethnic determination, Jewishness isn’t one ethnicity but a group of them. Even were I to set aside the Mizrahim and the Sephardim, Indian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Chinese Jews, the Teimanim, and a dozen or more other Jewish ethnicities (sorry guys) and focus only on the Ashkenazim, the European Jews, that both the common stereotype of Jewishness and Rebecca are supposed to represent, we’re nothing like as universal as the stereotype would suggest.

I’m blonde. I have pale skin and grey-green eyes and wavy hair. When I went to the synagogue on Friday night this week, I saw a lot of hair like mine, and a lot of eyes like mine. In middle school, of the six Jews in my year, three of us had blond hair, one of us had dark brown hair, and two of us had light brown hair. Four of us had light eyes, and only two of us had curly hair. Are we less Jewish because we don’t fit the stereotype?

And the stereotype is an artifact of the racialization of Judaism done by anti-Semites. Our evil was in the blood, and you could tell who we were by our looks. I remember exactly what all of the Jews in my middle school class looked like the way I do because my teachers made a point of it. While we studied the Holocaust, my teachers had all of the Jewish kids stand up to show how little we looked like the stereotype. The fact that we as a people have internalized this stereotype to such a degree that we even, in whatever small way have come to measure our own Jewishness against it is outright sickening.

Rebecca’s hair is the same kind of hair my friend from high school who introduced me to French horn klezmer has (It’s a weird animal, French horn klezmer, but she played the French horn, so there you go). Her skin is the same tone as an ex-boyfriend of mine who led the Seder dinner for me when I didn’t feel up to it after cooking all day. And her eyes? Those are mine.

This Hanukkah, I’m getting a miniature Rebecca doll. It’s so rare to see a representation of Jewishness that looks like me, that I can see my face in. I have the Ashkenazi features, the round eyes, thick eyebrows, and hooked nose, and still, they never look like me. This time, one does, and all the Jews who got to look like the representations for so long are up in arms. What they don’t realize is, when they say she doesn’t look Jewish enough, what they’re really saying is I’m not Jewish enough.

Hanukkah Sameach everybody.

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay: Even those who Remember the Past are Condemned to be Possessed.

2009-12-09T21:49:31Z

I do on occasion venture into the adult section of the library, almost entirely on recommendations, true, but it does happen. So, since I normally love Guy Gavriel Kay, and I gave him one of my few negative reviews a while back, and my library finally got Ysabel, it’s only been out for TWO YEARS (yeah, that’s like nothing for my library, but, come on, it’s me and a book) I decided I’d review it.

Ned Marriner isn’t sure what he thinks about Provence, but he really likes getting out of school for a while. His father, a famous photographer and his crew are making a book, and between scouting out places for his father to shoot and buying history papers off exchange students, he starts to discover something about his family’s past, and the fabric of history. When the parties to an ancient love triangle come back to haunt the present, Ned and his friends have to race against them to save one of their own...

Even when I brave the adult fiction shelves, I somehow end up with a YA novel anyway. It’s not just that the point of view character is fifteen. His voice bursts through the prose, and the readers get a feel for him from the first paragraph. Of course the YA or adult fiction label is frequently a purely marketing decision, but there’s a YA feel, and Ysabel has it. It’s a coming of age story about a boy touching the supernatural for the first time, but also about a boy realizing his choices affect other people, and that he has responsibility.

It was both very entertaining and a little odd for me to read the world as seen through the eyes of a fifteen year old boy. His self-centered-without-being-particularly-selfish way of viewing everything was a bit of a challenge at first. I had to force myself to remember that there were other views in the story than Ned’s. Fortunately Kay seemed to realize this too, and occasionally helped me out.

Kate was a wonderful female semi-foil for Ned, trying to impress him, and with her own limited immature viewpoint on the world, with caustic, childish opinions of her roommate even as she was the more scholarly, reliable one. I liked them separately, and together, and I loved watching teenagers just be teenage in the middle of the whole adventure.

Kay always writes excellent characters (usually a whole bunch of extra characters, actually). Ned, Kate, Melanie, Ysabel, and the rest made me laugh, and sympathize with them, and want to talk to them all the way through the book. When Ysabel took Melanie, I wanted Ned to get her back, not just because I wanted Ned to succeed in his coming of age quest, but because I liked Melanie, and I didn’t want Ysabel to have her. It’s one of the few times I really really enjoyed the damsel in distress character.

I was a little worried going in that Kay’s usual style of lyrical prose wouldn’t work as well in a contemporary setting that the otherworldly nature of it wouldn’t lend the reality necessary to allow me to suspend my disbelief. But he saved the otherworldly prose for moments of wonder within the story and made the rest of the prose solid and down to earth.

Also, Kay wrote witty dialogue and practical jokes to break up the tension. Ned talks like a fifteen-year-old boy who thinks he’s brilliant, and who likes to make himself and others laugh. When this mood changes, and Ned changes, the readers are pulled along with it. It’s a shock to the system, and it works perfectly.

Kay’s choice to focus only on one character’s experiences works very well for Ysabel. It helps build the tension and keeps the plot tighter than it is in some of his other books. There’s no chance for him as an author to shift to something just as the story starts to rise. Kay always has wonderful characters and prose (and you’d really think that would be enough, right? Picky Fish) but he sometimes falls down on plot. Not here. The plot is fast paced, the action is frequent, and the whole thing hangs together.

I was just a little nonplussed that Ned’s dad was completely alright with him buying a school paper from someone, and that he only told him not to make a habit of it. If either of my parents had found any of their kids pulling that one, there would have been hell to pay, and my parents are pretty easygoing. I suppose if you want to, though, you can read what happens after as a cautionary tale as to why one should always write one’s own history papers. You, dear readers, might get a trio of long dead nutjobs tossed in your lap who use historical landmarks in a gigantic puzzle that you have to solve to save your sort of babysitter, sort of crush if you don’t.

The one thing I really didn’t like, was the way at the end, there was the almost rescue romance of Melanie and Ned. Wait, isn’t Melanie well into her adulthood? Not only was I rooting for Ned and Kate, which was set up from the very beginning (and did end up being the primary romantic pairing) and Melanie and Ned weren’t set up as anything but a kid with a crush on an adult woman, but the whole idea is a bit creepy. Also, it seemed way out of character for Melanie, who was portrayed throughout as a hyper-competent hyper-responsible woman who saw Ned as a responsibility and sometimes friend. I did like the way it was resolved, though.

On the whole, however, this is one of Kay’s better works, deliciously fun, thrilling, tense, and at times even a little scary. There isn’t ant deep meaning or tragic sense of worlds ending as there is in most of his novels, just drama, excitement, and the perfect antidote to my winter blues.

Well, I still want The Lions of Al-Rassan back, but in the mean time, Ysabel can consol me.

Frostbite is the Sign of a Dutiful Child

2009-12-07T22:27:58Z

Someday I will stop regaling you, dear readers with my myriad physical complaints, but today I have a broken foot, and it’s green. At least I don’t have to lug my books around campus on crutches...

As I had to withdraw...

Because I’m sick...

Oh well, I’ll be back next semester, and until then, I’m burning through Netflix’s library and the recommendation list I have been granted in the comments of my recent post on disability and fandom (Thank you all!).

As it turns out, I broke my foot just in time to not quite miss having to help clean out our freezer, damn stupid luck.

My family functions on a seniority system, and Grammy had already had it up to here with the freezer, and so while we were trying to figure out what we wanted to keep, she had me picking through all of the mystery items to see what they were. I was less than enthused. She stopped at the first item, though, my horrible luck conquered her objections.

GRAMMY: I need you to see what’s inside this.
FISH: ...
MYSTERY BAG: *Leers sinisterly* How ya doin’?
FISH: Um, no, you.
GRAMMY: It’s your parents’ freezer.
FISH: You, daughter, responsible, for Mom.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s a lot to be responsible for.

GRAMMY: Overruled.
MYSTERY BAG: What, are you scared?
FISH: *Snatches mystery bag* No!
GRAMMY: *Stares*
FISH: *Eats own tongue*
GRAMMY: *Leans over to find granddaughter clutching pet bird that died a year ago and who we obviously never buried*

Seriously. My mom laughed at me.

I got to feel like a little kid again in the best way, as I was completely useless as kitchen help on Thanksgiving, not even casted yet, and therefore got to sit in front of the television and watch the parade and the dog show. And I got to sit at the head of the table so I could rest my foot on an ottoman, which Yo-yo commandeered as his own.

Drabble: Stop. Don't.

2009-11-26T19:14:11Z

Stop. Don’t.

Ty Lee’s father’s feet were as light as hers, and when she was little, she watched him hesitate, and draw them down, and keep his steps even, but didn’t know why.

Stop. Don’t.

Around her, her sisters followed his lead, and gazed at the sky with wistful smiles, and never left the ground, at least not where anyone could see.

Stop. Don’t.

Her mother always gave her father a puzzled look when he said that.

Stop. Don’t.

But Ty Lee dreamed she could fly and woke up sure she could. The air would never have let her fall.

Drabble: Banner

2009-11-23T07:28:33Z

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.

Banner

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.

Drabble: Harmless Old Man

2009-11-17T20:37:19Z

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.

Drabble: Teabending

2009-11-13T22:41:01Z

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.

Drabble: Time Flies

2009-11-11T17:30:45Z

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.

Drabble: Shipper on Deck

2009-11-07T18:19:04Z

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.

Shortfic: Whistling up a Storm

2009-11-05T17:08:43Z

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

The first day, only one stands out on the ice at sunrise, shifting from foot to foot, too anxious to stand still, but defiant, her hood thrown back. “I’ve come to learn,” she states, shoving her fists into the fur she wears.

Pakku stares at her. “Nukilik,” he rasps, shaking his head, “Go back to the Healing Hut.”

“You taught Katara,” she streams water above her head and then behind her and around her waist. “You said she was your best student.”

“What would your father say?” he asks, “you’d never find a husband.”

She freezes the water into a ball of ice and tosses it into the air, catching it over and over. “Are you afraid of him?”

He sighs. “He’s afraid for you.”

“If you teach me to fight, I can take care of myself,” she shivers, her shoulders shifting up to hide her neck. The ball of ice in her hands elongates into a clear, perfect blade, but she doesn’t notice. Pakku does, and his eyes widen in understanding. “Then he won’t have for be afraid for me.”

“Get into line, then,” he tells her, and thinks it’s wrong not to take away a little girl’s fear.

~*~

The next day, a woman stands in the training area, tall and uncertain amongst the boys, and Nukilik waves to her. “Master Pakku,” she murmurs, bowing her head, “I seek your permission to study under you.” The burn stretches over her cheek and down her neck, the skin eaten away on one side to show her teeth, and her words come out strained, the ice pack still tied to it.

“Why should I teach a woman who isn’t even intelligent to stay inside during a battle?” he snaps, pacing along the line of students and stopping in front of her.

“A healer doesn’t do any good if she isn’t tending the wounded,” she bows again, “Master Pakku.”

He nods. “Okay, you can stay.”

After he finishes class, he motions for her to stay behind. “I’m sorry about your husband,” he tells her, and she waves him off, ducking her head so that she can wipe away a tear without him seeing. “He was a good man.”

“If I had been the one to heal him, he’d still be alive.”

“If there’s anything I can do, Tuaq-”

“Just teach me,” she whispers, voice steady. “Please.”

“I already said I would.”

~*~

As the sun rises the next morning, it flashes off three betrothal necklaces, and Pakku almost walks back inside and leaves his students alone for the day. All three young women smile at him, and Tuaq the widow, and Nukilik smile at them. On Tuaq’s face, it’s a fearsome thing, but none of the girls flinch.

“What are your fiancés going to say?” he thunders.

“If he says one word against this, I’ll throw the necklace back in his face,” the girl with the roundest face assures him. He isn’t assured.

“None of them would even notice anyway,” the tallest girl tells him morosely.

“Why do you even want to learn?” he demands desperately.

The tall girl stands stiffly. “Why did you?”

“I want to fight at my husband’s side,” the round faced girl plants her feet into the snow.

“I want to learn how to make things,” the last girl says softly, “and if I have to learn how to fight before I learn how to do that, I will.”

He shakes his head. “Fine, stay.”

After class, he holds the tall girl back. “You never told me why you want to learn.”

She stares back at his set jaw and cold eyes and holds her head up. “Just in case.”

~*~

That night, Yugoda stops him on a bridge. “Master Pakku, it’s good to see you!”

He grunts and tries to pass her, but she subtly shifts to remain in his way. “What are you doing out here?”

“I always feel better when I take a walk in the moonlight,” she smiles. “Have an exciting week?”

He growls. “Moderately.”

“Did you know, today, I had a man come to the Healing Huts and ask me to teach him?”

“What!”

“Of course Ipiktok has been in and out of the Healing Huts enough times with all kinds of wounds anyway,” she says wickedly, resting her hands in her sleeves.

His smirk slowly turns into a real smile. “I suppose for him learning to heal is self defense.”

She chuckles. “Maybe he’ll live longer.”

~*~

When he walks out on the ice the next morning to meet his students and a dozen new girls stood waiting for him in the line, he doesn’t bother fighting, or even saying anything. As each one bows and asked him to accept them, he nods stiffly and directs them back into line.

~*~

Once, Pakku was always either first or last out on the training area in the mornings, never anything in between, but now he is either last or second. The round faced girl is always a little bit earlier, and sometimes Pakku wonders if she slept out on the ice. “Kanosak,” he calls, walking up to her. She starts. “What would you have done if your fiancé hadn’t wanted you to learn to waterbend and your parents hadn’t let you break off your engagement?”

She grins lazily. “I would’ve run away to the south pole.”

“And if your fiancé had chased you all the way there?”

She shrugs and stands a little straighter. “I don’t know. Run away to the Earth Kingdom, probably. They have water there, right?”

He laughs, but it comes out sour and sad. “Of course. Water, and oceans, and rivers.”

“Then I’d be right at home there.” She stretches out her arms and laces her fingers behind her head. “Or I could just freeze him in a block of ice. I think he’d get the message then. But it doesn’t matter. He thinks it’s great that I’m learning to bend. He likes it when I’m happy. He’s great that way.”

Pakku shakes his head. “I’m glad for you.”

Pulling a thin ribbon of snow from around her feet, she lets her lips quirk up. “I’m glad for me too.” The snow thaws as it flows, and freezes into a thin airless strip of ice.

“I will be leaving for the south pole soon, and I would like to take some of my students with me, to help rebuild.”

Her smile blazes out over the snow. “I’ll ask Mauja, he’ll be... Oh Tui and La, he’ll be...”

Another student, a boy, crunches over to the line, and a few moments later, the line is full.

~*~

That afternoon, Kanosak’s friend who wants to make things runs up to him along the canals and bows. “Master Pakku?” she begins tentatively, and he nods. “Kanosak told me you wanted to bring students with you to the south pole?”

He closes his eyes and holds in a groan. “I suppose you want to come.”

“I talked to my husband, and it’s a great way to get away from his father, and they need to build buildings, right? I’d be perfect to go, I-”

“Alright! You can come.”

“Thank you!” she shouts, flinging her arms wide to hug him, but then restrains herself and turns it into a bow. “Master Pakku.”

~*~

Pakku shields his eyes from the rising sun, and watches Tuaq and Nukilik. “You shift your weight like this, and then the water follows,” the widow shows her.

“Like this?” the girl copies. The water flows through the air, but then when her hands falter, the water splashes down to the ground and over her feet.

“Close,” Tuaq pushes her hands wider apart and guides them along the right path. “Very close, but keep your arms wide and then push the water with this hand and pull it along with this one,” she pulls Nukilik’s wrist and the water follows them both. “Feel it straining against you?” the girl nods, and Pakku watches the other younger girls watching them, and even the boys, glancing at them covertly around their bending.

At the end of the lesson when the students spar, Nukilik spars with one of the older boys. He is winning, but every time he hits her, she copies the movement and uses it against him a few minutes later. He uses advanced move after advanced move, only to have her send the water right back, until at last, he freezes her hands behind her back and her feet together. “Very good, Pakku sneers, “you almost lost to a first year student.”

“A very good first year student,” the boy mutters under his breath.

“Well,” Pakku smirks, “true.”

Nukilik glows.

At the end of the class, he holds Tuaq back. “It’s time for you to leave the class.”

“I didn’t,” she whispers, “Whatever I did, I didn’t mean-”

“You’re a master now.”

“Oh.” Her eyes grow wide. “But I’m not done learning!”

“Of course you’re not,” he shoots back gruffly. “I want you to teach the class when I leave.”

“Well,” she says, her shoulders riding up to meet her cheeks, “I’ll try to make sure they learn something.”

~*~

The ships are loaded, and his students and their sweethearts and their wives and children file along the gangplanks, their belongings in their arms. When the last one had clamored aboard, Pakku lifts his hands and the water pushes the gangplanks up into the ships. The crews untie the moorings, and unfurl the sails.

“Wait!” The tall girl freezes the top of a wave lapping away from the dock and leaps onto it. Under her hands, massive waves lift her ice board up and after the ship, and she flings herself in the air and onto one of the ships.

“Ahnah!” the girl who wants to build shouts from the deck of another ship.

~*~

A half moon glints off the waves and Ahnah curls her knees against her chest on the deck. “What about your fiancé?” Pakku mutters behind her.

“Why do you have to do that?”

“It adds to my mystique,” he says truthfully. Then he realizes her neck is bare.

“He probably won’t even notice I’m gone,” she tells him. “The money he won’t be getting with me, yes, but not me. I wonder if he’ll even carve the next girl a new betrothal necklace or just give her the one I wore.”

~*~

“You might be heading to new lives,” he says harshly, the waves crashing against the ships in time to his words, “but you are still my students, and you will still learn. Now... LINE UP!”

Where there should be groans, there are grins, and Pakku finds himself staring at them bewildered.

~*~

The ships weave their way between icebergs and closer and closer to the south pole. His students and their families array themselves on the deck and move their arms to guide their ships safely through the ice, throwing their hoods back to meet their southern brethren. When the village comes into view, his round faced folds her arms over her pregnant belly and smiles at it with a fierce sort of warmth. His student who wants to build grins widely, and he can see her building walls and domes and roads in her mind. His tall student kept her thoughts hidden behind half closed eyes.

~*~

“I thought you would have taken the hint.” Kanna stands with her village, hands fisted into her sleeves. “I can’t get rid of you, can I?”

“Who says I’m here for you?” he shoots back, tucking the new betrothal necklace into his sleeve.

Behind him, one of his boys lobs a snowball at the girl who wants to build, and she melts it mid air and sends a wave of snow his way. Another boy holds a globe of water above Kanosak and her husband, and they glance up at it anxiously. “Who are they?” Kanna points.

“My students,” he folds his arms testily, “To help the Southern Water Tribe rebuild.”

Her gravelly laughter breaks out over the frozen fields. “So the Northern Water Tribe teaches girls now?” her wrinkled face cracks into a wicked grin. “You must be thrilled.”

“Oh no you don’t!” Ahnah freezes the water above her friend and throws it back at the boy who was holding it. It hits him in the stomach, and sends him sprawling. With a flying leap, she lands astride him and shoves a snowball in his face. As she springs away, he gazes at her adoringly.

“I agreed to teach them, didn’t I?” he grumbles.

“I hope you know I have grandchildren now,” she tells him, frowning.

“I know; I taught your granddaughter.” he smirks.

“Really now.” It is all he can do not to tell her that her grandson is an idiot.

“Just ask my students.”

~*~

The walls around the Southern Water Tribe rise high and strong, glistening in the summer sunlight. Their builder sits atop them, her hands moving carefully, melting and reforming the ice to form patterns on it. Smoke curls in the air above the domed roofs of houses, temples, and workshops. Spread below her is all her work and the work of her friends. Sometimes in her dreams, she finds herself at the north pole, trapped in the Healing Huts and her own home, but then when she wakes, she opens her eyes and starts to smile.

A note on names:
Tuaq- lump of old ice, frozen into new ice
Nukilik- is strong
Ipiktok- sharp
Kanosak- gold
Mauja- soft deep snow
Ahnah- wise woman
I got these names from a site of dubious authenticity, so if they’re inaccurate, please tell me. I don’t even know if the gender is right or anything. Inuit is not my area of expertise to say the least.

Drabble: Push and Pull

2009-11-03T14:40:45Z

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.”

Children of Mars: Chapter Twelve

2009-11-02T02:43:48Z

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

The corridor outside the hospital wing stood quiet in the mid-morning light when Severus darted out as soon as Madam Pomfrey turned her back. Bleary-eyed and sullen, he hobbled down the corridor, down a flight of stairs and down a long winding ramp to the Potions classroom and sank into a seat somewhere in the back. When Slughorn didn't comment, he filched one of the spare student cauldrons from the cupboard and poked his wand underneath to light a fire.

"Sev?" Severus jumped, landing hard on his crutches, jamming his wrist. Lily held a vial of hippogriff saliva from the student cupboard, and she was trying very hard to smile. "Come up front with me."

He glowered. "You're half done already."

"Yeah, that's the point." She snatched up his cauldron and snuffed the fire underneath, keeping her eyes on his face. "Look, it's not like Slughorn'll complain; you're supposed to be taking the day off anyway."

They passed Black, Potter, and Pettegrew, absent Lupin and, exhausted, Severus would have stopped to watch Black stirring his potion listlessly and Pettegrew nodding off behind his book if it weren't for Lily's hand on his arm.

Near the front of the classroom, she gallantly pulled out a chair for him and he settled into it sulkily. "You don't have to do things like that," he snapped, "I'm not an invalid."

Lily snorted. "You look awful, Sev; I can't believe Madam Pomfrey let you out." Severus stared down at the table, pulling Lily's Potions book close. "Oh," Lily glanced at him sharply. "She didn't. You escaped, didn't you."

"Yes," he hissed.

She rubbed both sides of the bridge of her nose with her fingers and muttered, "Should have figured you would."

Severus relaxed a little, his arms still shaking against his chest and picked up the crocodile scales. Squinting beneath gunk filled eyelashes, he picked up four small scales and dropped the first one in.

Lily heard the tiny splash and stared into the cauldron as the scale dissolved. "Not yet, I hadn't stirred in the-" But the potion had started to seethe and turn a pale greyish orange. "Aww," she groaned as she watched it bubble over the side, hardening as it spilled.

"Oh!" Severus jumped, pulling ingredients and quills off the table while Lily extinguished the fire under the cauldron. Within moments, the bubbling stopped, and the potion hardened on the table and the cauldron into heavy ropes of rock-like orange mess.

"Great, Sev," Lily whispered.

"Shut-" when he looked up, Slughorn was standing in front of their table.

He shook his head. "Dear dear..." With a flick of his wand, the solid potion vanished. "Lily, Severus, I can always count on you to create the most inventive mistakes."

Lily smiled. "I'm glad we came through for you!" Severus scowled at the table.

"It's always the brightest ones," he assured her, "I suppose you two can't be brilliant all of the time."

"How kind," Severus snapped, as the professor scratched something on his parchment that didn't look like a zero.

Lily flicked the back of his head. "Go back up to the hospital wing."

Severus flinched. "No."

"You're exhausted!" she insisted so that only he could hear, "you're making stupid mistakes; you don't even have to be in class anyway!" He glared at his hands, hanging under the table, balled into fists. "Fine go to class then. See if I care if you transfigure yourself into a bookcase or something because you're tired."

"You have Transfiguration," he snapped back, "I have Charms." Every nerve felt raw, as if instead of spending the night before as a wolf, he'd spent it having every centimeter of skin being scraped off his body. His eyes had lost their protective layer of moisture and felt like they were rolling around in cups made out of sand paper instead of his skull. Every word she said kept pressing those nerves and shaking him until he wanted to crawl away from her and hide for a few hours, but that was what she was suggesting. It would be weak.

"Yeah, so you'll charm whatever your supposed to be charming into trying to kill you."

"Lily..."

Ignoring him, she waved to Slughorn with one hand, and pointed to the door with the other. As soon as she caught his eye, he nodded, and she shoved her pile of ingredients back into their places in her bag. When she left, she had Severus' bag over her shoulder too, and he swore inside his own head, propping himself up on his crutches to follow.

"Fine," he said sulkily as soon as he caught up with her, "You got me out of class. Happy now?"

"No." She handed him his bag and leaned against the wall. "Sev, you need to go rest."

He pulled the bag to his chest, using his elbows to hold the crutches steady. "No, I don't!"

She leapt away from the wall and rounded on him, hands in fists on her hips. "What am I supposed to do with you?" she whined, "You look awful. Why can't you take that as an excuse to skip class like anyone else would?"

Severus didn't know, but her face was centimeters away from his. Their noses almost touched. His pupils dilated, and his lips parted. His breathing all of a sudden came ragged.

"Oh my God, you're not breathing right," Lily exclaimed, cheeks flushed.

Severus' head jerked on his neck, shaking him out of his daze. "I'm fine."

He moved his head up to glare at her. Their lips brushed together. Lily shot backwards. "Oh!"

Severus wobbled backwards from where he stood hanging from his crutches, and pulled himself fully upright on them. "Oh God, I'm sorry, I didn't mean-"

"Oh," she looked at the floor so that she didn't have to look at him. "Well, alright then."

"I mean-"

Lily gathered up her courage. "Because I liked it if you did."

Severus forced down the dopey smile trying it's best to spread across his face. "Really? I mean-" why wasn't his brain working right? He sounded like an idiot. "I'm glad."

Even as Lily snickered, she tried gamely to stop herself. "I'm glad too."

The question burst out before he could stop it. "So what happens now?"

She stared at him, tongue-tied, twisting her hands into her school robe, and he felt that stupid, horrible flash of satisfaction that at least she was as disarmed as he was lance through him. "Does this mean we're together now?"

He flushed. "I really really like you."

With one hand, she tipped his head up while the other hung limply. After a moment, she pulled it up to meet her other one behind his head. Her lips quirked. "I guess I wouldn't mind having you for a boyfriend." She started to kiss his cheek, but thought better of it, and kissed his mouth. He swayed, shaking as she did. "Oh my God," she whispered, "you need to go to bed."

"I still don't like it when you tell me what to do," he said, suddenly swinging back to frustrated.

"Yes, well I don't like it when you fall over," she shot back, "go to bed, Sev, you're allowed to. You're supposed to."

Which was of course, why he didn't want to, but he knew better than to say that.

Severus glared sulkily and squeezed his school bag tighter to his chest. "Alright."

She smiled sunnily, with the good grace to hide her triumph, and hugged him around the shoulders. Holding his crutches in one hand and resting his weight on his good foot, he looped his bag over his shoulders with a very small smile.

Lily stared after him, wondering how exactly their relationship was going to change, except for kissing, at all.

~*~

The common room and dormitory were empty in the middle of the day when Severus descended into them, and he sank obediently onto his bed, but he couldn't sleep. He didn't really need to sleep, just lay there with his eyes closed, mind spinning. Sighing, he pressed his fingertips to his lips, trying to bring up the sensation of Lily's lips doing the same thing. The cool, sweet darkness spanned away from him and he stretched against the still ordered bed sheets with a smile.

~*~

By the time evening had settled over the school, Sirius' pretence that he had slept the night before was wearing thin. He had a smudge of grease on his nose and bits of mashed turnips caught in his eyelashes and his head drooped whenever Professor Dumbledore wasn't looking at him. "I can see you," the headmaster remarked when Sirius finally gave into temptation and closed his eyes.

"Of course you can," he muttered under his breath.

"And I can hear you too."

"Yeah, I know." He kept his head bent over the stack of the Headmaster's correspondence he was sorting through.

"You know, taking advantage of your prefect's once a month absence to sneak out of your dormitory with impunity is the sort of tactic I'm more used to seeing from my Slytherin students."

"My whole family's in Slytherin," he shot back, "I'm used to sneaky underhanded manipulation."

Professor Dumbledore chuckled. "I will keep that in mind."

"Anyway, It's not like Remus doesn't know we were out of our dorm last night anyway," he folded his arms, "so it's not like we're lying to anyone."

The headmaster smiled cheerily. "No, you're not fooling anyone. That's not quite the same thing as not lying."

Sirius flushed. "We aren't lying either."

"Since you are obviously not trying to fool anyone, and I have very little confidence Mr. Lupin would report you if you left the dormitory on any other night, I have to wonder why you choose full moons especially."

Sirius' jaw jumped, and then his face settled. "It's nothing special."

"Then why for the last year have you been out of your beds every full moon?"

The twinkle in the headmaster's eyes meant he thought he had him, Sirius realized. "No reason! It's just this way Remus isn't around to tell us to stop having a good time!"

"How do you know we're not just taking advantage of the good lighting to sneak out into the forest for a midnight picnic?"

"Not afraid of the werewolves, then?"

"I know that's just a legend." Sirius grinned. "If there were a bunch of werewolves that close to Hogwarts, every Auror in the country would be out there to round them up. I know."

"Perhaps you're taking advantage of the fact that none of the other students would be brave enough to follow any of you inside on that one night instead." He peered at Sirius over his candy bowl and his low hanging glasses, and Sirius shrugged.

"Yeah, I guess."

"If that were the truth, you would have told me that in the first place." Professor Dumbledore smiled.

"It's not nice to do this when I'm sleepy," he grumbled, pushing hair out of his face lazily.

The headmaster kept on smiling.

"I don't see why Remus and Snape get to stay in bed all day when you know James, Peter, and I were up all night too."

Professor Dumbledore set the candy bowl down. "Ah, but you have a choice to be safe and secure in your beds. Mr. Lupin and Mr. Snape no longer have that choice." Sirius froze before trying to shake the image of Snape running around the Shrieking Shack, trying to get him to chase. "Now why don't you tell me exactly why you were out of bed these past few months?"

~*~

Sometime late in the evening, footsteps clattered, muffled against the carpeted floor. Severus shook the sleep out of his head, pushing slippery clumps of hair out of his face. He glared at Avery. "What're you doing here?"

"It's after dinner." Avery glanced around at the windowless walls. "Idiot."

Severus swallowed his groan as he pulled his robes away from where they stuck to his body and shook out the creases. Hopping awkwardly on one foot, he grabbed his crutches with a scowl. "Really?" he sneered. "'Idiot's' the best you can do?"

"You're not worth the effort of coming up with something better."

"Out of my way."

Avery leaned unmoving against his bedpost, his voice mock-kind. "I'm not in your way, Snape."

Balancing on his good foot and one crutch, he hooked his other crutch under Avery's legs and swept him to the floor at the foot of the bed. His wand slid out of his sleeve and into his hand. "Thank you for moving anyway," he sneered.

Avery pushed himself up off the floor. "You're going to pay for that, Snape."

To his dismay, Severus started to laugh. "Somehow after seeing you kissing Mulciber's feet, I can't find myself intimidated by you at all."

Avery's wand flew into his hand, and with a swipe, Severus went sailing through the air to slam into the wall, dust from the tapestries swirling through the air at the impact. "No matter what," he spoke softly, walking to stand over his housemate. "I am better than you, werewolf. You are less than anyone else in the school, even the Mudbloods. You are less than me."

"It's 'I am' you pathetic..." Severus burst out, from where he lay slumped against the floor. "Can't you even get that right?"

For a moment, Avery stared at him nonplussed, wand slack in his hand. "You're correcting my grammar?"

It was all Severus needed to pull himself up and dig his wand deep under Avery's ribcage. “Sectumsempra."

Avery moaned and collapsed to the floor, blood spurting from his stomach and chest. Severus shot to his foot and crutches holding his wand in front of him like a torch and watching the other boy writhe. A thousand curses flooded his mouth, trying to escape, but then his narrowed eyes widened. His hand shook around his wand, and for a moment, he couldn't move, couldn't even hear Avery's cries. All at once, the stillness was broken. Contemptuously, Severus swept his wand over Avery's body, speaking the counter-curse over and over again until his wounds stopped bleeding and closed.

"Can't even kill me properly?" Avery gasped as Severus drew a vial of dittany oil out of his trunk and tossed it down on his chest.

Severus pulled his hands into his robes to hide their shaking. "There's no point," he spat, closing the dormitory room behind him. On the dark landing outside, he swallowed and balled his hands into fists until the trembling subsided. He had Avery. He had all of them, they just didn't know it yet. Next year, he would be here alone, and they would be in cells in Azkaban.

The blood still pounded in his ears, and surrounded by stone, it echoed around in his head. When he emerged from the stairwell into the soft, eery light of the common room, the noise of seven years worth of students hit him like a wave, blocking out the blood and numbing his disquiet with irritation.

~*~

Sirius couldn't seem to unclench his jaw or come up with any sort of believable lie. As the headmaster gazed at him impassively, he stayed rigid and still and silent. He finally opened his mouth, with nothing to come out of it when someone knocked on the office door. Letting loose a relieved puff of air, he turned around in his chair, his mouth closing into a smile. It opened on its own, but Sirius noticed he could only see one of the headmaster's hands.

Snape stood in the doorway, blinking in the light. "Ah, come in, Mr. Snape."

The Slytherin swung himself forward to stand before the headmaster's desk. "My apologies. I didn't mean to be late."

"I didn't realize you had come to enjoy our company that much." Professor Dumbledore raised an eyebrow.

"What do you mean?" he snapped suspiciously.

"If you hadn't fled the hospital wing, Madam Pomfrey would have told you your detention for tonight had been cancelled."

Snape swallowed. "Oh." That would have been good to know. "Just this month, or from now on?"

Professor Dumbledore's eyes twinkled over his half moon glasses. "Of course, I expect you to spend the day after the full moon in the hospital wing." Seeing Snape's face twist, Sirius didn't bother to hide his smirk.

"Oh," Snape muttered, back very straight. "I'll go then. No, wait, I wanted to ask you something."

"Ask away, Mr. Snape."

"Not in front of him," his mouth twisted as he glanced Sirius' way.

"I had hoped that the two of you would come to trust each other-" Sirius squawked furiously, but Snape just shot him a very dark look. The headmaster raised an eyebrow again and waited for the two of them to calm down. "You will need to if you want to survive what is coming."

Sirius and Snape swallowed together. "Still," Snape said, hunching his shoulders and leveling a scornful glance at Sirius, "I'll wait outside until Black's gone."

"No need," Professor Dumbledore replied genially. "His detention was almost over anyway. Mr. Black, you're dismissed."

The breath Sirius didn't even realize he was holding rushed out of his lungs, and he had to force himself not to sprint for the door while the headmaster was distracted.

As soon as the door shut behind the Gryffindor, Severus settled into the chair he had just vacated. “Professor, I...” he trailed off, unable to go back to his dormitory yet, and unsure of what to say. “I wanted to know if you’d told the Ministry about the information I had for them.”

Professor Dumbledore folded his hand on the top of his desk. “Not yet.”

“What!” Severus demanded. “Why?”

“As soon as I do, it becomes public, and your life will be in danger,” he reached across the desk and patted Severus on the shoulder, “and I for one would like you safely hidden away for the summer before I do any such thing.”

“Why can’t you just expel them?” he shot back, clutching the arms of his chair.

“Because students have been accused of terrible crimes before, and been expelled.” He had a faraway look in his eyes, but Severus didn’t trust it for a moment. “And been completely innocent.”

“But these ones aren’t,” he mumbled, starring at his hands.

“Of course not,” the headmaster soothed, “but it sets a bad precedent on a tradition I am trying to change.”

“Oh.”

“You will be safe, Mr. Snape, you have my word on that.”

“I...”

“After all, I wouldn’t want to lose so diligent a student in potions.” The hand slipped off his shoulder and retreated to the headmaster's other hand. “Though I did hear you didn’t make it to Charms.”

“I wasn’t doing anything illicit, if that’s what you’re implying,” he leaned back in his chair staring at the headmaster dubiously.

“No, I suppose you weren’t.” Severus relaxed ever so slightly. “But if you leave the hospital wing like that again after a full moon, I expect you to attend all your classes, and detention in the evening.”

“Alright then.”

“Or you could just stay in the hospital wing and recover.”

“I will do that.”

~*~

When he passed Avery's favorite chair by the fire, he could feel the prefect's eyes on him, wary and resentful. It sent a rush of pleasure pulsing through him.

To Be Continued...

Author's Note: My excuse skipping last month’s chapter involves a high fever, delirium, and soporific anti-nausea medication, along with assorted other miseries. However, I took the opportunity to build a set of buffer chapters (Yay!) and I’m working on getting the whole thing written so I can just post monthly and not have to worry. Also, I said there would be no shipping in several reviews a couple months ago, but Severus and Lily refused to cooperate.

Drabble: A Thousand Faces

2009-10-30T18:07:42Z

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.

Drabble: Form Over Function

2009-10-30T05:37:22Z

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.”

Three Drabbles about Azula and her Guests in her Asylum

2009-10-29T00:56:43Z

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.

Drabble: Pointing the Way

2009-10-26T06:03:51Z

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.

Weird Little Post-War Drabble

2009-10-24T23:58:41Z

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?”

Drabble: More Powerful Than You Could Possibly Imagine

2009-10-20T17:06:52Z

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.

Drabble: Children’s Stories

2009-10-19T04:55:20Z

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.

Jar of Dirt Dance

2009-09-27T03:11:00Z

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.

Drabble: A Matter of Appearances

2009-09-21T20:59:30Z

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.

The Smoke of the Muskets: Lloyd Alexander's Westmark Trilogy

2009-09-17T06:18:15Z

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.

Lloyd Alexander was in the habit of writing the same story with the same characters over and over again in different locations. His boys were always young, naive, adventurous, foolhardy, brave, and rash, while his girls were always wise, brave, mercurial, just, loving, young, and forceful. They always went head to head with evil, held onto their principles (though often precisely what those principles were had changed by the end), and came away victorious, older, wiser, and ready to change the world. This gave rise to a comforting sort of predictability, and I had a tendency to read his books when I was sick and in need of comfort. Since I was frequently sick, I read most of his books in fairly quick succession.

When I first read the Westmark Trilogy, I found myself deeply disgusted and furious, that I reread other Lloyd Alexander novels quickly to get the taste out of my mouth, yet now, they're my favorite three books he ever wrote and the ones I think influence my own writing the most. The conflict in Westmark, the first novel in the trilogy is not between the heroes and ultimate evil (or even ultimate evil's human avatar) but between the heroes, conmon mostly, and the insidious Chief Minister Cabbarus, who is at that moment at least, a small, weak, moralizing, human evil. When Theo meets him, he "expect[s] a monster. He [sees] only a gaunt, thin-lipped man he could have taken for a town clerk or a notary." From there it only gets murkier.

In the Westmark Trilogy, Alexander deconstructs, at times outright viciously, the rest of his entire body of work. Dr. Torrens, a peasant, voices the common philosophy of governance in the rest of Alexander's books, and indeed much of the high fantasy genre. The journeys the heroes and heroines undergo in other books by Alexander enable them to become good kings and queens. They gain wisdom and empathy and become the most important thing in the happiness of fantasy realms, good monarchs. Florian, a former aristocrat, meanwhile wants to do away with the monarchy entirely. Many critics, especially science fiction authors have asserted that fantasy is an inherently conservative genre, perpetually looking backwards nostalgically at feudalism and monarchy. Alexander, Philadelphia native and staunch American patriot, answers them in the Westmark Trilogy. To make it all even more interesting, Mickle is a very good queen, and its under her reign under which Florian's dreamed of revolution finally takes place.

At the end, Theo is left not only wiser, but also disillusioned. He is left asking "Even if the cause is good, what does it do to the people who stand against it? And the people who follow it?" He doubts his own good nature buy the middle of the first book and flees his best allies and the moral corruption they represent. Instead of fearing personal cowardice as most of Alexander's heroes, Theo feels a certain internal darkness. Like most of Alexander's heroes, his coming of age and personal growth will have a profound effect on the rest of the world, but unlike the rest, the journey leaves him almost destroyed. As he finds himself battling good, indeed battling old friends, he imagines he must be in the wrong. Theo's great journey of learning concludes not with the knowledge that others are as good as he, or that he must show empathy, both of these he already knows, but that he is no worse than anyone else and others can be completely terrible. His journey ends with the realization that any form of government that relies on goodwill and unselfish people is doomed to fail. It's a bitter bitter realization and it tears apart Alexander's normal favorite picture.

It's not just the plots and philosophy that Alexander holds up to the light of self-criticism. I have never been particularly fond of Alexander's Heroines. They bemused me. I never could understand their motivations, or what made them tick, and the explanation for their most inexplicable actions was often simply that they were women, or more rarely despite their age, that they were girls. As a girl myself, this didn't satisfy me, and it showed in Alexander a profound state of mystery in which he held women. Though he gives voice to some of this in the voice of Florian, who refers to his two female followers as goddesses and treats them more as muses for himself and the men rather than people with scholastic aspirations of their own, he at last characterizes his female characters in the Westmark Trilogy as real people whose minds work in real comprehensible ways. Mickle is like no other Lloyd Alexander heroine, instead being prickly, practical, proud, stubborn, haunted, and most of all, logical. In previous books, the boys seek to understand the feminine gender and fail and come to realize it's impossible. With Theo and Mickle however, they understand each other completely and that's why they love each other.

Structurally, Alexander falls prey to an excess of exposition in the early parts of especially the first novel, Westmark, though he makes up for it by making the exposition witty and more than usually enjoyable. Also, as deconstruction, Alexander first has to set up what he wants to deconstruct. If anything, he uses even more fantasy tropes in this trilogy, despite the lack of magic or pseudo-medievalism than his other works. There's the beggar girl who is really a princess, the evil chief minister controlling the good king, the fake psychic, the orphaned hero, the princess love interest, the lovable rogue, the feudal government, the rightful heir... you get the picture. The point is, he lulls us poor readers into a false sense of security.

As a trilogy set in a fantasy world Enlightenment, when politics and political philosophy were spoken in every nook and cranny and revolution was in the air, Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen are all incredibly political. I don't mean to say they advocate any particular political agenda, but that they are my favorite type of novel. They have court intrigue, revolutionaries, infighting, war, betrayel, and realistic well thought out political maneuvering. The world is in absolute flux. You my dear readers, know how much I love that. I just can't help myself. Fantasy is one of the best (though one of the least well used) mediums for this sort of political thought experiment. Likewise, it's morally ambiguous fantasy (or secondary world speculative fiction, but really!) with everyone really trying to do the right thing. Friendship brushes up against opposing ideologies, leading good men and women to fight against each other and die and kill each other, trying to save a little bit of what they see as good in the world.

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

I Hate "Teachable Moments": Disability and Fanfiction, or How Not to Fail at Disability in Comments

2009-09-09T06:03:32Z

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.

The Pain Merchants/The Shifter by Janice Hardy: The Dark Underbelly of Magical Healing

2009-09-06T06:09:42Z

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 one fun book! The chaotic, frantic adventure, Nya’s snappy first person narration, the high stakes of a nation boiling over with resentment at its conquerors’ hash treatment, all of it gels together into a deftly written, action-packed,good time. I read it in one afternoon.

There’s a bit of a chick lit feel to Nya’s narration that meshes very well against the epic, secondary world fantasy background. I know I probably scared you dear readers by talking about Nya’s special abilities (and she has a touch of the cursed with awesome about her, true) but her powers, while unique, aren’t the only strange powers popping up, and the rest of the characters don’t treat her like she’s wonderful or special, and she’s delightfully fallible. Nya’s willingness to flirt, joke, explain, tell relevant, funny family stories, and freak out kept me wanting to follow her through the story instead of go off on little hypothetical fantasy world explorations, despite the fact that there was a sad lack of political maneuvering (though there is some corruption, wait I’m not supposed to tell you that).

Hardy takes the classic fantasy trope of magical healing and makes it into a national resource. Healers are kidnapped by both sides in conflicts and forced to heal until they burn out. In Nya’s home after the conquest, the only place where her people can really be treated as important and valuable is in the Healer’s League because healers are so needed. Healers and healing are used as a tool of war, as it truly is. Nya’s unique abilities, which make her a direct weapon of war instead of an indirect one as most healers are, just serves to underscore this point. Centering the magic in the story around it and deconstructing the trope really really works in this particular adventure. Granted, the way everyone in the story, even non-healers focus on the League and healing is a bit over the top, but part of that is who exactly we’re meeting, so it’s not that noticeable.

Hardy’s South Florida raising and Georgia living is obvious in the way she treats the rivers in her book as a place of danger, full of crocodiles and choked with weeds. Replace crocodiles with alligators and it sounds really familiar to me. For once it was nice to see a fantasy world geographically like the one I grew up in (except the mentions of mountains) that wasn’t Xanth. The way Hardy wove the climate into the world’s resource base and I cheered a little bit when she talked about coffee plantations and other tropical farming and crops. That’s some fresh world building.

What isn’t quite so fresh is the way despite the fact that Hardy didn’t fall into the trap of writing Northern European geography and climate, she did recreate Northern European feudalism and culture. Given how much geography and history shape culture, highly improbable. Furthermore, the people that populate this country are pale skinned with straight fair hair, and the people who conquered them are curly black haired white people. So the good guys are pale whites and the bad guys are darker whites... Have we seen this before?

To make up for it though, the Baseeri don’t just have an ethnic hatred of the Gevegs (Nya’s people), complete with oppression, suspicion, and ethnic epithets, (obvious enough, or should be anyway) and likewise, the Gevegs aren’t all purity and sunshine either, with brutal, strong arm rebel groups and a deep hatred not only of the Baseeri Duke and officials but of the Baseeri people (yay!) but also have a tendency to see other conquered people as competition, and so treat them with suspicion and resentment. More, the Gevegs are eager to treat even more recent Baseeri conquests with the same contempt with which the Baseeri treat them, proof that there is always someone who is at least lower down than they. Hardy gets this right. She gets ethnic relations of this sort so right and so believably right, and weaves them in so adroitly that I had to stop, not to question my own assumptions, but just to question Nya’s.

Probably what I liked most about The Pain Merchants was Nya’s sheer fallibility. She doesn’t just screw up and get things wrong and have to fix them, she’s prone to taking the path best for her, even if it’s not morally right, and then has to go back and repair that. Best of all, I loved the way she remembered with such fondness her former place as the daughter of aristocrats. She longs for a system that probably wasn’t much better for the poor of Geveg than the Baseeri, and remembers it as right, because she was on top. It’s not the inequality she minds, and were she somehow to become a Baseeri aristocrat, she would probably put her considerable wits to maintaining the status quo, but her place within it. No, what I like best is the way I can’t help but like her anyway.

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.