5hc for an Ocean Spirit Katara AU? (Like in the same sense that yue was blessed by the moon spirit?) I can’t remember if you have one for that or not, but it’s a favorite premise of mine

I don't. The closest I have is a Katara-Yue role swap, where Katara becomea the moon. So you get a whole new AU.

1. Katara is born silent, eyes closed, not crying. Her chest barely rises and falls. This happens. Some babes are born only to die. There is nothing to be done. It has happened as long as children have been born. Nothing to be done? hisses Kanna as her son and his wife weep, caught between the exhaustion of birth, and the grief of losing a child they will never get to know? Nothing to be done? She takes the baby from her son's wife and carries her to the frigid ocean. She dips her in the water and begs. There is no oasis here, no koi, but surely the Ocean Spirit is in the ocean. Ocean, give her granddaughter the strength to live.

2. Katara's eyes open, and her mouth opens to wail. Her dark brown hair turns a bright watery blue. Kanna wraps her granddaughter up tight, and holds ber close to keep her warm, and carries her back to her parents.

3. Little Katara grows up, bright, strong, and a waterbender, the only waterbender at the south pole. She is in all ways a normal little girl, and a loving sister and daughter, but to the people of her village, she is a miracle child, saved by the spirits themselves, and marked by them too. Sokka, in the face of this, struggles fo be seen, to be noticed, not by his parents, but by everyone else. It galls, to be known as Katara's brother, when Katara is just his annoying little sister with weird water powers and weird blue hair. Sorry Sokka, your sister is an anime protagonist, and you got to learn to live with it.

4. Then their mother dies, ans their father leaves and they find the Avatar, and leave on adventure, and it's all big and new, and Katara has to cover her hair to keep it from being noticed, and they're chased by Zhao and Zuko, and they make all the way north, and Katara has to fight to learn waterbending, but finally, finally they make it, and she gets to learn.

5. And then Zhao attacks the Northern Water Tribe fortress, and marches to the Spirit Oasis to kill the moon, and he... kills the wrong fish. The ocean draws back as if there is about to be a tsunami, but the water just keeps drawing back, exposing the deep dark parts of the sea that have never seen the sun, and Katara, blessed by the ocean itself, knows what she has to do.

Can you do more of the Lu Ten back from the dead AU?

That describes more than one AU of mine, so I have chosen the one where Zuko is brainwashed by the Dai Li, and while under Lake Laogai, finds his cousin. Continued from: [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

Aang wakes up, with, what must be said, is perfect, and perfectly awful, timing. Lu Ten is just about to make his escape, when the Avatar opens his eyes and starts having a freak out about being on a Fire Nation ship, and about how he failed to save Ba Sing Se from being conquered by Azula (Azula? His little cousin, Azula? That Azula? Conquered Ba Sing Se?) So of course Lu Ten does what all good little Fire Princes do, and tries to follow him, because that's the Avatar! He should capture him and take him home to the Fire Nation, and come out of his captivity covered in glory! His father and grandfather will be so proud.

So of course when Aang ends up stuck on some driftwood and washed ashore by the kindly Moon Spirit, Lu Ten ends up washed up, half drowned, on the beach with him. And he's still half drowned and wondering if he really saw the Moon Spirit, or just hallucinated that bit, when the Avatar's friends show up. After the hugs and reassurances, the question quickly becomes what to do with Lu Ten. The problem of course is several fold. 1) he is a danger, because he just tried to pull a Zuko and kidnap Aang. 2) He was pretty useless about it. Zuko could have done better in his sleep. This shows that Lu Ten is still kind if not fully with it, and kind of needs to be taken care of. 3) And Lu Ten's dad is in prison for helping them-

Wait what? His dad is in prison for helping the Avatar and a bunch of teenage enemies of the Fire Nation? His cousin Azula, who last he checked was eight, conquered Ba Sing Se? His cousin Zuko, who is ten, which is, he supposes, not much younger than the twelve year old Avatar, but still ("I'm pretty sure I'm thirteen now, actually, I mean dates are weird with the whole being frozen for a hundred years thing, but...") is not only trying to kidnap the Avatar on the regular, but is apparently doing pretty well at it ("uh, we wouldn't go that far... Also Zuko's sixteen, and Azula's like, fourteen, we think? It's not like she told us.") Oh okay, Zuko is sixteen. He was captive for six years? Six years? Oh. Oh okay. Okay. Wait, who had his dad imprisoned? What do you mean Firelord Ozai? How did Uncle Ozai become firelord if his dad is still alive?

What the Avatar and his companions tell him is confused and disjointed, but what what explaination he does get paints a bleak picture, especially when they tell him that both his father and his cousin said that Ozai, and/or Azula would probably kill him if they found out he was alive. Lu Ten has no idea what to do, and finds himself trailing along after a bunch of teenagers ("Toph's twelve") by default. And when one of those teenagers ends up being dragged off to school, and then getting in trouble at said school, and having to have a parent teacher conference, Lu Ten is the only adult in reach. He works out in his head how much older he would be than his supposed son. If the Avatar is thirteen, and Zuko is sixteen, and Zuko was born when LunTen was ten, he would have been a father at thirteen himself.

Fortunately for everyone involved, six (it's six, right? Wow.) years of captivity have aged Lu Ten beyond what is expected, and he looks far beyond his twenty-six years, old enough to pass as Aang's father. He does his best with stolen clothes and his reflection in a pool of water in the cave they've been hiding in. The Dai Li kept his head shaved, and it's only had a little time to grow out into a spiky fuzz all over his head. He looks like a disgrace, his topknot shorn, the delinquent father of a delinquent son. But it's the best he can do. He isn't exactly surprised when the principal threatens his "son" with being sent to the coal mines. He also doesn't believe a word of it.

After Aang holds his little dance party, amd they all have to run out of town, he finds himself on the road with a pack of children, and is baffled by how many "adventures they find themselves in, impersonating spirits (a Fire Nation town shouldn't be in this kind of squallor!), getting taught by Piandao (who Lu Ten stays well away from, since Piandao could recognize him), dodging assassins, and running into secret waterbending blood witches. That last one was horrifying in so many different ways. She wanted... She tried to kill him. She tried to force the others to kill him. She... Was, at least on some level, a captive like him.

And at the end of it all, when they meet up with the ragtag "army" heading to storm the Fire Nation capital, he hears about the eclipse. And he decides that while the rest of them are trying to take on Ozai, he's going to spring his father. So, he slips away during the fighting and heads for the capital prison tower. Hopefully that's where his father is being kept. And Lu Ten might not have Zuko's ability to break into and out of almost anything, but it hardly matters, because he has barely made it inside when his father, having broken himself out, runs into him, and they leave together.

All this means is that when Zuko (who never did tell anybody about his cousin being alive, which is going to make his tearful reunion with his uncle and cousin a little less awful) shows up to the Western Air Temple, the Gaang is short one Fire Prince. And now they have a new one. Yay! And once he starts to become friends with them, they've got a whole bunch of questions about just what exactly is going on with his family. And yeah, the answers he gives are, well, they are... Wow, Zuko, no wonder you're so messed up!

@sightofthesun53 asked:

More stuff for the au where Zuko accidentally kills Ozai on the day of the black sun?🥹 I'm especially curious about his shaky relationship with the gaang.

Continued from [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

Okay, so I talked this a little bit in previous posts, but what's going on is that Zuko killed his father and then took the throne without ever joining up with the Gaang. So he never had the chance to form individual positive relationships with them, they never became friends, they never built trust, and the gaang never came to see Zuko as one of their own.

Cast your mind back to the Book Two finale. This is where Zuko's relationship with the gaang ended. Katara still smarts from what she views as a profound betrayel, when Zuko sided with his sister, after sharing a moment of understanding and commiseration over the losses of theit mothers. She views him as untrustworthy, and a danger to the people she cares about, and consequentally, to the fragile peace Zuko himself helped bring about. And Zuko does not exactly have a ready way to build trust with her. Or, as Zuko would think of it, get her not to hate him.

Sokka and Zuko likewise have a lot of baggage, not least of which is the fact that Sokka killed Zuko's sister, something both Zuko and Sokka feel differently about moment by moment. And of course, Zuko also killed his father, and if you think he doesn't have large and complicated emotions about this that he struggles to process or understand, well he does.

Aang wants to think the best of Zuko, and to trust him, and he's working on it, but that trust is still fragile, built as it is on a foundation of Aang's deliberate and self-chosen optimism. And Toph never really had to deal with Zuko at his worst, and she likes his uncle, so she's more or less willing to play nice. And Suki only knows him as the guy who burned down her village and released her from prison, so she's willing to see where this goes.

Basically, they are not friends. They aren't enemies, but they don't really like or trust Zuko, and there is nothing he can do about that, other than keep doing the right thing as Firelord. And half the time he has no idea what the right thing is. And with his uncle gone, because he has to be, and with only Mai and Ty Lee there that he can rely on, well, it's lonely at the top.

Let's hear your headcanons/ideas for the universe where Baby!Zuko was whisked away through time and popped into Aang's saddle mere moments before they crashed into the Arctic waters and all the consequences that would bring. For starters, I can see the conversation about nature & nurture that happened around TomTom between Sokka and Kataara to happen much earlier because of that.

Contined from the first scenario here: [Link].

I have to wonder how easy it is to tell a Fire Nation royal baby from any other baby. Is he dressed differently? Zuko is roughly two at this point, which means he's old enough for his eyes to have settled into their golden color, but unless you're looking for it, that's kind of hard to tell apart from brown. And he's pale skinned and black haired, but both of those are traits found in abundance in the Earth Kingdom.

So what's left are clothes. Tom-Tom was wearing a white tunic edged in pink, and pinkish grayish loose pants. While Zuko's would undoubtedly be the finest quality, I'm not sure that they would be any different. And the colors and shapes that Tom-Tom is wearing at that age are all ones we have seen in Earth Kingdom dress, for example the shade of pink he's wearing on his tunic is very similar to the one that Song wears.

What I'm saying is, would any of them know, looking at him, just who this random baby who showed up, is?

In the initial post, I had him dressed all in Fire Nation red, and that would of course give them an indication of where he's from, but they still would have no idea that he is a royal baby, or specifically that he is Zuko, the missing prince.

And like, once they've established that Aang is in fact from a hundred years ago, the reasonable assumption is that the baby is from a hundred years ago too.

So they have this random baby from before the war, and sure, Sokka is team evil Fire Nation baby, but not only are Aang and Katara team it's a baby, you jerk, but so is Kanna.

This whole situation lasts for a couple of weeks, until this actual asshole named Commander Zhao shows up, because that's just How the universe is, and this is why we can't have nice things. He is thrilled to find the Avatar, and easily capture him with a little bit of extortion, but he also manages to recognize this strange baby's fancy baby clothes. How the heck did they end up with Prince Zuko's baby clothes, on a baby who looks suspiciously like he could be Prince Zuko, but is weirdly still a baby, Zhao has no idea, but he'll be eaten by a fish if this isn't the best day he's ever had. He's taking these two back to Firelord Ozai. He's getting that promotion.

(Psst, I have no self-control and would also love to see more of that Ozai-kills-Aang AU.) (Side note, how do you get me so invested in universes based on upsetting plot elements that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole if they were just fics on AO3 or something?)

I really suspect a lot of it has to do with the low commitment of a short post over a long fic, and the emotional distance of a post format over the immersion of a fic. But anyway. Continued from: [Link].

1. Zuko doesn't have to make a speech at the funeral corronation. His father didn't when his grandfather died. But he knows if he doesn't make a speech, the Fire Sages will, and they will talk about his father's greatness, and he can't stomach that. So he writes his speech,and maybe it's the time to be conciliatory, and let the dead rest, but he can't do that either, not when his friend has only just died, not when he still feels like there's poison burning its way through him. So when the day comes, he stands next to his father's pyre and tells the crowd that his father was a cruel vicious man, who wanted to destroy what he couldn't have, and Zuko spent most of his life trying to please him, and only wised up a few months ago, and left to help the Avatar put a stop to him. He killed Aang, even though he was just a kid, and that doesn't surprise Zuko at all, because branded Zuko accross the face when Zuko was only a kid. He's not surprised, because the war killed lots of kids. And Ozai knew it wasn't about bringing Fire Nation civilization to the world. It was about conquest and having more. He says that no one said anything when his father burned him, even though it was public because they were afraid. He says they all grew up hearing about how the Fire Nation was better than everyone else, but it's not. But it isn't any worse either. They've all been afraid for a long long time, and they owe it to themselves and to all of the kids, and everybody else, that Ozai, Azulon, and Sozin hurt and killed with their help, to remember what they became when they were afraid, and to do better now that they don't have to fear Ozai anymore.

He tries not to be discouraged by the dead silence that greets his words.

2. After the funeral, Toph leaves. People she's never met before recognize her and tell her how amazing she is, the little girl who slew the Firelord, slew him like a monster. It's all she ever thought she wanted, people noticing her and noticing how strong and capable she is. But she just feels sick. Their admiration feels like it's clawing at her, like their words are talons. She runs away, to a place she always heard as a child was as remote as she could go, to the swamps in the Southern Earth Kingdom, where her parents used to whisper, the people didn't even know about the war. She runs into the mud, with the sounds of everpresent life, and death, swirling around her.

3. And she hasn't been wandering long when she feels feet on the mud beside her. A boy, a little shorter than her. He tells her about his father and his brother, about his mother dying when he was a baby, and about how alone he feels, and how his father hates him. He sounds like Zuko. He sounds like her. It's annoying. Yeah, okay, fine, she snaps back. That's what they're like, who are you? She means what is he like as a person, but instead he tells her his name: Prince Ozai. Toph screams. She rushes at him, earthbending clods of dirt out of the muddy ground. Before they hit him, he vanishes. No, she tells the swamp, the spirits, the universe. She will not feel guilty for killing the man who killed her friend, and who wanted to kill the world. She knows she's lying, but she clenches her fists and walks on.

4. With Zuko back on his feet, the full weight of Aang's loss hits Katara. It feels like it did after her mother died, when she felt lost more than anything else, and helpless. And now that Zuko doesn't need her anymore, it's going to be time to go home, and the last thing she wants to do is go home, because her dad will be there, and he will want to take care of everything, take care of her, so that she can just grieve, and the last thing she wants to do is grieve. It all feels like it's sucking her down.

5. Until one of the dozens of officials, who crawled out of the woodwork to manage the end of the war, trying to be comforting, tells her that her friend has already been reborn. And she realizes yes, the Avatar has been reborn, and somebody needs to find them. Back in the north, she learned that the Avatar switches between the north and the south every cycle, and the last water Avatar was from the Northern Water Tribe, so the next one should be in the Southern. So yeah, she'll go home, but she is a job to do now. She tells Zuko, and he solemnly wishes her luck in hunting the Avatar. She laughs weekly and punches him in the arm the way Toph might, but there's no force behind it, and when they hug goodbye, they're both crying.

Would love more of the Megamind Atla AU! It’s absolutely hilarious!

Thank you!

Continued from: [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

1. It takes a minimum of glaring and threatening before Sokkamind and Katara cave, and lead Suki, Mai, and Ty Lee to the broom closet where Katara stashed Zuko. The door opens, and Zuko blinks against the sudden light, sees the hulking shape of Katara's gorilla mech-suit, and does the only sensible thing. He yells and tries to rush her. He tackles her around the middle, and instead of knocking her down, he barely knocks her back. Possibly this was not the only sensible thing he could have done. Possibly it was not very sensible at all. Mai and Ty Lee grab him, and pull him off. He looks around at them, and at Suki, and Katara, and Sokkamind, and goes, oh, no, have they all been kidnapped by Sokkamind? Were is Azula? He heard her voice.

2. Information is exchanged. Sokkamind learns that Zuko is Azula's brother. Zuko learns that his sister is now a supervillain. This probably should be more surprising to him than it is. Once Mai and Ty Lee make it clear that using Zuko as a hostage will not do any good, because Azula doesn't actually, like her brother or care about him, Sokkamind is left at something of a loss. Suki tells him he's being ridiculous, and kidnapping can't be his plan for everything.

3. In the end, what they decide to do is go try to find more about Metro Man's weaknesses, since it stands to reason, that because Sokkamind used his DNA to empower Azula, they would share weaknesses. And like, they know Metro Man had weaknesses, because Sokkamind accidentally killed him with copper. Suki, Sokkamind, and Ty Lee go off to investigate, and leave Zuko, Mai, and Katara behind to distract Azula by video call.

4. When Zuko, Mai, and Katara go back to the monitors, Azula is waiting for them, extremely annoyed, about having been kept waiting, and where is Sokkamind? Zuko and Mai decide it's time to share some embarassing childhood stories with all of Metrocity watching this video call of theirs, and Katara starts critiquing Azula's villainous posture and lack of spikes. It genuinely hurts Katara to have to do this, because Azula's regal sprawl is actually dead perfect, but oh well. With the first embarrassing story, Azula tries to cut the feed, but Katara has finangled something so that she can't, and as she gets angrier and angrier, Katara tsk tsks at her lack of villainous panache. Azula's first impression on the people of Metrocity is certainly nowhere near what she planned, but none of us are as cool as we are in our heads, are we.

5. Meanwhile, Suki, Sokkamind, and Ty Lee Don't find anything about Metro Man's weaknesses at all. In fact, what they find is Metro Man, Aang, alive and well, and having faked his own death.

Part two of that post where Nonny asked:

I think I might have an au you don't have yet — what if Zuko or Azula had been sent back to Aang's time when they were young because of spirit non-sense, and had ended up in the iceberg with him?

This time it's Zuko's turn. Part One: [Link]

Let's say Zuko is a toddler. Azula isn't even born yet when her brother disappears. The shock of the disappearence sends Ursa into labor. The child, Azula, is full term, but it makes her birthday a day of pain and rememberence for her parents. Both her parents are relentlessly protective of her, even smothering. It's the only thing they ever agreed on. Without another child to soak up all his displeasure, Ozai is always unpredictable. Is his daughter the perfect child, a demonstration of his greatness as a father, or an unworthy child, who should be doing more?

Ursa tries to shield her daughter from the worst of her husband's capriciousness, but even though her mother is safer, and kinder, sometimes Azula just needs some time on her own, and neither of her parents will ever give her that. Lonely and isolated, constantly with her parents, she has an imaginary friend, her older brother, her parents' missing child. Sometimes he's two years older, and sometimes he's frozen at the age he was when he vanished.

Let's say Aang is lost in a storm, when suddenly he hears a child crying. There's a little boy, all dressed in royal Fire Nation red, sobbing his eyes out in Appa's saddle. Is this real? Is he sleeping? he tries to stear out of the storm, but the winds and waves drag them both down.

Or let's say Zuko grows up in the Southern Air Temple, one of several foundling children. He grows up an anxious young man, who tries to take responsibility for everyone, so when he spots the young Avatar running away, he slips out after him.

Le's say instead that Zuko is ten, and his grandfather ordered his death mere days earlier. His mother vanished, and now he is whisked away to this strange place, full of people who claim to be Air Nomads. He knows that's not true. He has to have been kidnapped by enemies of the Fire Nation. But surely his father will rescue him or ransom him right? Won't he? That gnawing, ever-present fear that his father won't, that his father just doesn't care enough, is proven right when the Air Nomads contact the Fire Nation government, and they get back word that nobody has ever heard of a Prince Zuko.

Azula is no dummy, and more important for this, though she doesn't understand that, she's around her father, and he doesn't shut her out, so she has the context for her mother's disappearance, so just like her father, she assumes her mother kidnapped her brother. He always was her favorite.

As Ozai sends search her after searcher, assassin after assassin, to find his wayward wife, and as they each come up empty-handed, as if the person they were hunting didn't exist, Azula lies in her bed at night afraid her mother will come for her next, to steal her away from her father, to steal her away from being the Fire Nation princess. But she's even more afraid, although she'll never admit it to herself, that her mother will never come, that her mother only ever cared about Zuko, that she really does think Azula is a monster.

Let's say Zuko is thirteen and newly banished when he vanishes without a trace. Nobody notices. Except Iroh. After weeks of fruitless searching, he is forced to contact Ozai, to let him know and ask him to look for his son. But Ozai's only, all too predictable response to his own child's disappearance is, "good." And Iroh can't help but think his brother made Zuko disappear, that he might have banished his own son so that nobody would notice when he did.

In the air temples, Zuko is a menace, convinced they are a secret group of Air Nomads hiding the Avatar, who he will find, and capture, and bring home to his father. He is difficult, and dangerous, and his psyche is a bleeding wound. The Air Nomads care for him as best they can. In return, he accidentally lets slip enough for the Air Nomads to know what's coming, to plan for Sozin's Comet. And when Aang runs, Zuko runs after him, convinced this is his great chance to capture the Avatar.

Let's say Zuko is sixteen and has just seen a light burst forth into the sky. As he stares at it, the world dissolves around him, and he is in the Southern Air Temple. He has found the Avatar in a way he never imagined. And when the Avatar runs, he gives chase. Hunted and hunter are lost in a storm together and dragged down to the depths.

Iroh barely has time to start looking for his nephew before he's out of the ice and causing him heartache again.

Let's say Zuko is an old man. One morning he wakes up at the Southern Air Temple over a hundred and eighty ears ago. Enough extremely strange things have happened to him over the years, first hunting in avatar, then becoming his friend, then traveling the world to help another Avatar, and along the way tangling with a whole bunch of spirit related shenaniganery, that this might as well happen too. He doesn't know if he has time traveled, or if this is the afterlife, but either way, this might as well happen too.

He tells the Air Nomads what to expect from Sozin's Comet, and after, the tactics the Fire Nation plans to use against any survivors. He claims he's a defector, that he heard the plans, and couldn't go through with them. And he graciously accepts a place to stay for the night. That night, unrelated to the news he brought because the boy knows nothing of it, the young Avatar runs. Zuko follows. He gets to Appa first, hides under a blanket, and it's not until they're in the air that Zuko pops out to scare Aang half to death.

He talks to Aang, asks him what's bothering him, tries to help navigate him to the Southern Water Tribe to find a waterbender, but Aang understandably doesn't trust him, and steers them straight into a storm. As the wind in the waves drag them under, Zuko thinks he might have miscalculated.

But then the two of them saw out together, and teenage Zuko shows up, and now as far as the gaang is concerned, there's cool old man Zuko, and annoying teenage Zuko both running around at the same time.

More You Had One Job please?

Continued from: [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

1. Zuko follows the Avatar north, catching up to him and his friends occasionally, always failing to capture him. Special import and focus must go to the time Zhao captures Aang, and Zuko must sneak into one of the most secure Fire Nation fortresses on the Earth Kingdom continent to break him out, and how this all ends with Zuko unconscious, and having to be rescued by the Avatar, who feels the need to talk at him about friendship. Zuko, who is a lot less tightly wound and afraid of failure, having spent the last three years succeeding at things and becoming a boy hero to his people, pretends to go back to sleep, and then makes his move, attempting to capture and again, who runs off into the swamp.

2. But nothing really materially changes until after the debacle at the North Pole, where Zhao gets himself killed by an angry fish spirit. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. But anyway, Zuko and Iroh escape the Northern Water Tribe fortress by the skin of their teeth and spend three weeks on the back of Zuko's increasingly large baby dragon, before landing in a resort town of all things, where they lick their wounds and charge the bill to Ozai. When he gets the bill, he will be furious, but then when isn't he?

3. And Ozai is furious. Not about the bill. He hasn't gotten that yet, but about the fact that Zuko hasn't actually captured the Avatar. Sure, he's always hated it when his son succeeded at a task he was supposed to fail at, but he has also gotten very used to enjoying the fruits of those successes, and in this case, Zuko found the Avatar, and then failed to capture him, which is the worst of all worlds, and now it's Ozai's problem, whereupon the vanished Avatar who wasn't getting up to any trouble, wasn't his problem before. So he sends out his much more competent and wonderful daughter, to collect her brother, so that he can't do anything else, and get them into even more trouble, and he never thought he'd want his son back in the Fire Nation, but please bring him back before he does something else.

4. But this isn't the same Azula who goes in canon to pick up her failure of a brother, who believes her father's favor and disfavor is right and deserved, thanks to her competence and her brother's utter incompetence. This is an Azula who has watched her brother achieve impossible success, while she is stuck at home, and her father is constantly talking about how wonderful she is, and how stupid and useless Zuko is, when he's out there conquering Ba Sing Se for them. It's really not possible for her to deny to herself that her brother is incredibly gifted, and that her favor and his disfavor are arbitrary, and she has no idea if she is actually going to succeed in capturing her brother. And she has no idea how her father is going to react to her failure. He might cast her off and decide she's as useless as Zuko, or he might completely ignore her failure, because his favor is arbitrary.

5. So she isn't all that surprised when she first fails to capture her brother and uncle, when they see through ber lies and escape. But the thing about that failure, is that part of what happens is that she has to make her goals public, and now everybody knows that her father wants her brother locked up, that he doesn't want him to continue hunting the Avatar and possibly capture him, he wants him in a prison cell. And the thing is, Zuko is practically a fire nation folk hero. He captured Omashu for them. He captured Ba Sing Se for them, he raised a dragon. He is nearly single-handedly responsible for conquering the Earth Kingdom for them, and he is responsible for the greatest string of Fire Nation military victories the world has ever seen. Ozai might not have realized that the rest of the world doesn't see his son the same way he does, but the rest of the world is noticing. And when push comes to shove, the rest of the Fire Nation is starting to think about which one of them they would support, Ozai, or Zuko.

I know I have asked this before but please could you do five headcanons for the gaang age swap au?? if you don't mind

Universe tag: #Gaang age swap AU.

1. Let's talk about the Serpent's Pass and Ba Sing Se. I've been glossing over that until now, because it's a sad and tangled mess. Zuko and Iroh are traveling with the Gaang at this point, and when they meet a pair of peasants (be nice, Zuko) who are robbed of their tickets and passports, they too are dragooned into crossing the Serpent's Pass. Iroh however, knows exactly why the Serpent's Pass is named that, having lost quite a few ships on that lake that were meant to function as his supply lines during his six hundred day seige. He helpfully informs the Avatar of this fact.

2. The peasants lose what little wits they have (what did I say about being nice, Zuko? Besides, it's little wit or few wits, not little wits. Bad grammar makes you sound like a peasant.) and the situation is not improved when an old friend of the Avatar and his companions shows up, a young woman named Suki, who is working as part of the port security force. She grew up on Kyoshi Island, and has plenty of experience with big sneaky water monsters and she wants nothing to do with this one, and thanks going over the Serpent's Pass is a terrible idea. Not to worry, Iroh's troops figured out how to handle a serpent emergency. He buys for dirt cheap two elderly turtle-oxen from a refugee who wasn't allowed to bring them into the city, and was struggling to persuade the ferry cooks to buy them for meat. Then, when the lake monster starts getting too close for comfort, Iroh quick gives a shot of lightning to the first turtle-ox and Toph uses earthbending to launch it far into the lake. The serpent takes off after the splash, finds dinner, and is distracted. They keep going, and when the serpent is done, they do the same with the second turtle-ox. They get across safely, and Aang finds the whole experience a powerful reinforcement for his commitment to vegetarianism.

3. Once the peasants and their new bundle of joy are gone, finally, (Nephew, really!) and Suki has hitched a ferry ride back to the other side of the lake, Iroh quietly tells the group that they can't let anyone in Ba Sing Se know who he or his nephew really are. They're just friends of the Avatar. No names. That night, once Sokka and Zuko are asleep, he tells Aang, Katara, and Toph about the seige of Ba Sing Se. Toph tells him she already knows.

4. Zuko spends their entire time in Ba Sing Se being, as he sees it, disregarded, disrespected, and ignored. For example, after that Joo Dee lady leaves, Zuko helpfully informs the Avatar that he wouldn't have to wait if this were the Fire Nation. He would get to see the Firelord right away, and sure he'd be drugged and in chains, but at least he wouldn't have to wait six to eight weeks for some bureaucrat to decide to let him see the monarch. The Avatar laughs and ruffles his hair. See, such disrespect. His uncle and the Avatar have him right where they want him and now that they do, they just want to treat him like a helpless child!

5. Is it any wonder that when later, his sister asks for his help, and treats him as able to give help, he says yes?

I am a sucker for sprit!zuko so. Blue spirit is a real spirit, and taking a spirits name means taking up their role/binding yourself to them. Zuko didnt see this coming.

Extra triple points of this same thing happening to Katara with the Painted Lady.

I love this idea, not least because it prompts so many questions. Like, is this something actors have to worry about when playing spirits? Are there precautions to prevent this? Do sages and religiously inclined people ever do this on purpose?

And of course if this happens with Katara, the Painted Lady is implied to be the spirit of a specific river. How does she react to Katara leaving the immediate vacinity?

What kind of spirit is the Blue Spirit anyway? What does binding himself to such a being mean? How will this affect him as Firelord? Does the spirit have any kind of control over Zuko? Can Zuko get out of it? By the end of the series, his friend, and Katara's boyfriend, is the bridge to the spirits. Does he have to negotiate their release?

So many questions, so many places this could go.

I think I might have an au you don't have yet — what if Zuko or Azula had been sent back to Aang's time when they were young because of spirit non-sense, and had ended up in the iceberg with him?

What I love, and also hate, about this prompt is that it's at least twelve different potential AUs wrapped in a trenchcoat, depending on exactly which sibling I choose to go back in time, how old I make them when they go, and how long they're in the past with Aang before they're frozen.

Let's say we start with Azula, who travels into the past as a toddler, barely old enough to know her own name. She grows up at the air temples, after having been found there, and like Aang, after everyone finds out he's the Avatar, she feels like an outsider, and she sneaks off with him when he runs away, and is frozen in the iceberg at fourteen.

Or let's say that she does not grow up at the Air Temples, but instead appears with Aang in the storm, and is frozen with him. Until he wakes up, he thought the baby in Appa's saddle was a halucination. Either way, back in the modern day Fire Nation, Ursa is griefstricken at the sudden disapearance of her child, while Ozai is furious at what he, understandably, is sure is a kidnapping. Each waits, desperitely hoping their daughter will be found, and as the years go by, and Azulon is unwilling to do more than a perfunctory search for his granddaughter, Ozai's outrage grows. Zuko grows up, not as an only child, but a child with a hole in his family, a gap where his sister should be and instead there are only terrible feelings of pain and grief, and fear from his parents.

Without a "perfect" child to compare him to, Ozai is both smothering and hypercritical of his son. Certainly he would never kill him on his father's whim, nor would he banish him. But instead, when Iroh returns home grieving his own lost child, this misery rubs against Ozai and he finds it unbearable, and he sends Iroh away. It's Iroh, who in the depths of mourning crafts for himself a new purpose, to find the niece that went missing so many years before.

Let's say instead Azula is eight when she disappears, not all that long after her mother vanished. Ozai is convinced Ursa stole her from him, while Zuko faces the sudden disappearance of his sister so soon after his mother, and to him, a little boy, lacking all knowledge of what actually happened to his mother, it just feels like someone, or something, is snatching away the people he loves, and he's terrified he could be next.

Ozai sends the army after Ursa, but nowhere they look turns up anything, neither Ursa nor Azua, and Ozai is left only with his worthless son. Is it any wonder he banishes him, and sends him away to hunt another person, vanished into thin air?

When Azula arrives at the air temples, she's old enough to know what happened to the Air Nomads, old enough to have swallowed a hundred years of Fire Nation propaganda. She knows she has to be back in time, but she's so young, and so convinced of the Fire Nation's inherent superiority, that she is less guarded than she should be, and she gives them the information they need to plan for Sozin's Comet. She doesn't mean to, but she changes history for the better, and staves off a total genocide.

Let's say Azula is eleven, and her brother has just been banished. He is sent to hunt the Avatar, and by providence itself, Azula finds him. She's old enough to know time travel is impossible, so she assumes she's in some secret hidden enclave of Air Nomads, who survived Sozin' Comet, and have hidden away the Avatar. Well they made a real mistake kidnapping her. She'll capture the Avatar and bring him home herself.

She doesn't know that her father assumes Iroh stole back in the night to kidnap her. She doesn't know he has Zuko's ship tracked down and searched. When Azula is nowhere to be found, and Iroh and Zuko are utterly baffled, and both demand to know if Azula is missing, her brother is given a new task: find his sister and bring her home.

Let's say Azula is fourteen. She has just been sent to find and arrest her brother and uncle, and had them both slip through her grasp. She knows what must have happened. The universe is trying to tell her something. But she doesn't care. She makes her own destiny. She will find and kill the young Avatar before he can be a problem.

Let's say it's after the war, and Azula is sliding in and out of reality. She finds herself back in the past, and assumes it's only a other hallucination. But this means when she unfreezes in the future, there are two Azulas, one cool and collected, one anything but. But neither mean Zuko or the Avatar anything but ill.

This has gotten very long, so I will save Zuko for a part two in another post.

For the 5-headcanons prompt, what about more from the Yue and Azula role-swap AU?

Continued from: [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

1. Aang, Sokka, and Katara are no idiots. They can tell Bumi is stalling for time. For what, though, they have no idea. And if Aang trusts his old friend implicitly, Sokka and Katara are not ready to give him the same latitude. And who can blame them after what he just pulled? But anyway, it means that both of them show up to the nicd lunch in the second nicest garden Bumi insisted they attend, in not the very best moods they could possibly be in. There are two teenagers there already, dressed in fine flowy silk robes. Sokka and Katara walk inside warily, only for the two to greet them warmly and introduce themselves as Prince Zuko and Princess Yuzu.

2. Ah, so are they Bumi's children? Grandchildren maybe? Great grandchildren? Are you both incredibly muscular under those fancy robes and about to beat us up? (Sokka! Hey, it's a valid question, you saw King Bumi!) No, the two assure them, they aren't going to beat anybody up, and they aren't related to King Bumi. But, Prince Zuko hastens to add, he could definitely beat them up if he wanted to. This makes his sister burst into giggles, and when Prince Zuko asks her what she thinks is so funny, she tells him that one of the kids is the Avatar, and Zuko hasn't ever been in a fight with anyone, so there is no way he would win. Zuko mutters something under his breath about not fighting the Avatar anyway because he's twelve years old and who would fight a twelve year old? Yeah, says Princess Yuzu, because Zuko would lose, and that would be really embarrassing.

3. So Katara asks, how did they get to be prince and princess of Omashu if they aren't related to King Bumi, and Princess Yuzu tells her, oh no we're not the prince and princess of Omashu. Our father is the Firelord.

4. Well that sends Aang off his cushion and over to the garden gate in a flash. As Sokka holds up his razor sharp boomerang warily, the two launch into the whole sad story of how their father disowned them, and their uncle took them in and smuggled them to Omashu, and he's on his way back to the citybto speak with Aang, and that's why King Bumi is stalling for time, and they don't have to worry about Zuko and Yuzu, because they want to ally with the Avatar, not fight them.

5. And the two really get the feeling that they have failed at the whole good first impressions thing, when Aang asks why he would want to help them? He's supposed to fight the Fire Nation, not help put the rightful heirs on the throne. The war goes back long before the current firelord anyway. But Yuzu, who has been for the last year or so, harboring an ambition to be an ambassador when she grows up, looks at him with her beautiful eyes earnest and solumn and says, well yes, but wouldn't it be so much easier if he has an ally ready to take the Fire Nation throne and lead the country into a peaceful future?

And yes, that is a very good point. Aang agrees to wait for their uncle.

Hi! Can I please have some more of The Ones Who Walk Away?

Continued from: [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link], and The Ones who Walk Away: [Link].

1. Zuko and Iroh spend the time the comet is in the sky at home, trapped inside the house, pretending to be sick. The power it gives leaves them giddy, and consumed with a restlessness that crawls under their skin. Even Aang feels it, even though he doesn't yet know he's a firebender, or what that means. And when the comet finally spins away, off into space, Zuko really does feel like a fever has been broken.

2. Word reaches the village of Ba Sing Se's fate, first as rumor, then as news. And between the two are tense days full of anxious whispers. And it's the day the news breaks, the morning before the afternoon when an official messenger arrives, that Zuko's boss's daughter, the one with the crush on him, runs up to him before he can set sail. She has no packed lunch, not for him, not for her father, and her eyes are wild. She yells for her father and half the village to hear that she knows he's Fire Nation. Is he a spy? Where was he during the comet? Where they helping conquer Ba Sing Se? What kind of a monster is he?

3. Zuko is a little confused here. Like sure, he's Fire Nation, and a firebender, and everything, but he spent Sozin's comet trying not to vibrate out of his own skin, and taking care of a toddler in the same condition. He wasn't conquering anybody, and how did this girl know he was Fire Nation anyway? (Does this mean she won't bring him anymore steamed buns?) So he stammers his way through denials, and she says he has gold eyes, and how is Zuko supposed to deny that, and then her father starts telling her off for bringing up a refugee's Fire Nation features, because of what that might mean, and now Zuko wants to be sick, and his uncle has come running with Aang on his hip, and...

4. Iroh smiles sadly, and soothes, and spins a story about being Zuko's mother's uncle, about Aang and Zuko being brothers, and "children of the war," and when their mother died, their Fire Nation soldier father didn't want anything to do with them, so he stepped in to take care of his little sister's kids, and they left their village in the northern Earth Kingdom to come here. Oh by the way, both boys are firebenders, and part of the reason they ran is so that "Li" wouldn't be conscripted into the Firelord's army.

5. After Zuko and his boss had set sail, one of the villagers, a busybody grandmother, who had already figured out that the two were from a wealthy family, asked Iroh if he and his sister were local nobility, and if his sister had been forced to marry an officer. It was a common enough practice, and some of the marriages were more willing than others. It's a useful fiction, and in some ways, even true. Iroh says yes, and even tells her that Li's father sent him to school in the Fire Nation until he was thirteen. Soon the word is all around the village, and no one questions Li's Fire Nation ways again.

Can I get a continuation for The ones who walk away?

Continued from: [Link], [Link], and [Link], and The Ones who Walk Away: [Link].

1. Katara and Sokka make their way north, faster and less eventfully than they would have with a twelve year old Avatar. They do not go to the Air Temples or to Kyoshi Island. They don't go to Omashu, or to Gaipan but instead sail along the east coast of the Earth Kingdom continent, until they reach Chameleon Bay in the Eastern Sea, where, as it transpires, the Southern Water Tribe fleet has been holed up. They spend some time with their father, telling them what happened back home with the Fire Prince, and the airbender baby, and about Katara's worsening accidents, and when Bato returns injured from a mission, he agrees to escort Sokka and Katara to the Northern Water Tribe, and to get them settled. Having sailed so far north, he also takes them ice dodging in the northern waters before they tackle meeting their people's sister tribe.

2. This means that Katara goes to the north as a woman grown in the eyes of her tribe, and the Chief's daughter. Of course, she goes as all of that when she goes with Aang, but her father never was chief when she was growing up, certainly not of a united Southern Water Tribe, so she never got used to thinking of herself that way. But Bato, Hakoda's best friend, is able to think through those implications, and press the point. So when the northerners (mostly Pakku) make it clear that girl waterbenders are trained to heal and nothing else, Bato starts talking about an insult to southern customs, and to his chief, and manages to get an agreement that one of the lesser masters will teach Katara as long as she also learns to heal. Katara is hardly going to turn down healing lessons. Her tribe could use a healer or twelve anyway.

2.5 Comander Zhao, without Zuko to humiliate or an Avatar to capture, remains at his dead end post, his dreams of moon spirit fish sticks unfulfilled.

3. Without Katara and Aang to fill the reservoir, Jet must wait for the summer rains to fill it, and to flood the village he once called home. It's a scene of carnage, with Fire Nation soldiers, Fire Nation colonists, and Earth Kingdom villagers killed indiscriminately by the rush of water. Children are killed. Parents are killed leaving children orphaned. It's a horror. And in the aftermath, the surviving Fire Nation soldiers hunt down Jet's forest enclave and set fire to it, causing more horror, and more dead children. Jet goes out in a blaze of glory, and when the Fire Nation rebuids Gaipan, as they already did once before after having destroyed it themselves, when they continue to control the village and the valley, it's no longer Jet's problem.

4. Back in the Fire Nation, Ozai plots what use he will make of Sozin's Comet that summer. It's Ba Sing Se. He plans to use it to break Ba Sing Se, to do what his brother could not. And because Azula has never been to war, never conquered Ba Sing Se herself, when he announces that he plans to leave her in charge of the Fire Nation in his absense, it doesn't feel like a punishment. It feels like a test. One she intends to pass. With her brother gone, she will rule the Fire Nation for real one day.

5. All this is to say that the world keeps turning without Iroh, Zuko, and Aang. And Aang is still in that awkward stage between toddler and child, Iroh's garden is still in that awkward stage between a shambles and well set up, and Zuko is still in that awkward stage between caught and knowing about it when Ozai conquers Ba Sing Se, and brings the Earth Kingdom to its knees.

What if when Aang was awoken by Katara, Zuko was at the other end of the globe at the North Pole?

This is is kind of an interesting prompt for me, because I don't think anything substantial would change. We know that when Aang is at the Southern Air Temple, he triggers the statues into having their eyes glow, which causes the eyes of Avatar statues and paintings to vlow in various places around the world, including in the vicinity of some Fire Sages, which presumably starts the Fire Nation hunting them, and probably since the closest Fire Nation Commander is Zhao, he would go after them.

Zuko would get word of this pretty quickly and start sailing back south, to head them off, and I suspect he would catch up with them sometime around the middle of their journey north. At that point, they would have already seen Zhao and some of the might of the Fire Nation military, and they would be less inclined to view Zuko is a real threat. The one thing that would change is that since Zuko wouldn't have recently beaten Zhao in an Agni Kai, Zhao might be a little less murderous towards our favorite Fire Prince.

Now what could be really fun is if the first time Aang and Zuko meet is in the Blue Spirit, when Zuko is breaking him out of Zhao's clutches. Again, not much substantial would change, but it would be full of delicious angst.

What if instead of Aang being found by Katara he is found by Zuko before he gets his face burnt. Would the fire nation try to immediately kill Aang? Or would they try to indoctrinate him?

I think Zuko might try to convince Aang to side with him and his father, however haphazard and ineffective the attempt might be. But Ozai? I don't think so. Ozai' reaction to meeting thirteen year old Aang is to say that the universe delivered Aang to him as an act of Providence, and then made a very good go at murdering him. And Aang at this point was either twelve or thirteen. And he had no qualms about branding his thirteen year old son across the face, and banishing him, or tossing aside his fourteen year old daughter. To Ozai, Aang is plenty old enough to be a threat.

For Ozai to decide that it was worth trying to indoctrinate Aang, I think Aang would have to be significantly younger, which is why for example, when he gets his hands on little Avatar Sokka, he tries to do so.