Genderswap AUs, AKA the many many many possibilities for girl!Zuko’s name. Today we are going with Kazuko.
1. When Kazuko is thirteen, her uncle helps her sneak into a war meeting, and she speaks out in defense of newly recruited Fire Nation soldiers being used to bait a trap for the Earth Kingdom. She is told she must fight an Agni Kai for the insult, and when the opponent turns out to be her own father, the kneels down and refuses to fight. He burns her for the disgrace.
Instead of banishing her, he takes advantage of the customs of the enemy. He tells her thst if she loves the Earth Kingdom so much, she can marry into it. The fact that she was defending Fire Nation soldiers goes unnoticed, and as soon as she is reasonably healed, she is packed in a boat and sent to the Earth King.
2. She is of course much too young for Kuei, and their marriage is never consumated. It was expected that it would be when she was older, but instead, for three years she lives the cloistered life of a queen in Ba Sing Se, and if she thought her mother’s life was restrictive, it’s got nothing on this. She figures out pretty quickly it’s Long Feng who is really in charge, and she isn’t sure her husband, who she sees only rarely, actually understands why he married a scarred child other than the vague word “politics”. She doesn’t think he understands the treaty he signed, or why she is here, or any of the things that even as Ozai’s despised and disregarded daughter, she knows.
3. The treaty Kazuko’s father signed with the Earth King (or more accurately with Long Feng) is that the Fire Nation will leave Ba Sing Se and its surrounding territories alone and instead continue their campaigns of conquest in Earth territory not within the Earth King’s dominion, and Ba Sing Se’s forces will not be used to defend those territories. This suits Ozai fine. He has no intention of tackling Ba Sing Se just yet, and in the meantime, he can scoop up some suddenly much easier conquests. It is however a treaty he intends to break, and Kazuko walks into her marriage knowing this. The only question is what is she supposed to do when the Fire Nation does attack. Is she to be killed as a useless hostage, will she die at the hands of her father’s forces? Does he expect her to be a double agent for him? In the end, she keeps Azula’s presence secret for her and sides with her to conquer the city. For her pains, she is named governor of Ba Sing Se.
It’s there in the city that Mai and Kazuko kindle their child crushes into romance, and Mai chooses to stay behind with her in Ba Sing Se. Azula, who has suffered far fewer defeats without an interfering sibling around, says okay.
4. Governing Ba Sing Se is no easy task. Azula may see it as a suitable job for an idiot unwanted sister, but it actually takes a lot of skill and hard work to disentangle th Dai Li, keep the peace, and cement the Fire Nation conquest. And then there is managing the occupation. Kazuko, who has spent the last three years banging her head against the brick wall that is Long Feng and the Dai Li does not appreciate the Fire Nation officers and officials who try to treat her and her city the same way. She and Mai work hard, long hours trying to make it work. But they are women from a conquering empire, and they are not well loved. Much of the underground critisism is extremely misogynistic in nature, and some of the writers even manage to guess the nature of her and Mai’s relationship, or at least post lurid accusations to that effect. It’s lots of fun.
5. It’s Iroh who teaches the Avatar how to firebend, Iroh who warns them what Ozai intends to use the comet for, and Katara and Toph who go to take Azula on together. Iroh goes to liberate Ba Sing Se and also his neice, who he hasn’t seen in more than three years. He has a crown princessship to offer her if she wants it. Kuei, who shows up not long after the White Lotus retake the city is like, “You can’t go? We’re married? In the Earth Kingdom we don’t do divorce?” and Kazuko is like, “In the Fire Nation, we totally do, get fucked, Kuei, our marriage wasn’t consumated anyway.” She leaves it to Mai and Iroh to put this in more diplomatic language.
Tag: Avatar The Last Airbender
Made up fic title: where the dead sleep
Time for the Avatar/Old Kingdom fusion literally nobody asked for!
Katara is a Clayr who has just been called by the Watch for the first time. Her brother Sokka, not only is a boy, unusual for the Clayr, but he is sixteen and still no visions. He does have an extraordinary talent for making magical things though. Meanwhile they stumble onto Hama, a Clayr who survived being dragged into death, and years later, even managed to escape, alive. She warns them of a great and terrible evil Greater Dead creature named Ozai, who is the one who made the Old Kingdom into the horrible haven for the Dead and free magic that it has been for the last hundred years. Katara and her brother set out to find the lost heir to the throne and the Abhorsen, in hopes of saving their home, but is Hama all that she seems?
Star Wars is really really important to Hufflepuff Zuko. As the twin son of the evil right hand woman to a Dark Lord, growing up, the original trilogy felt like it had been written just for him. The idea that these two kids who were the children of this really evil man could choose to stand for what was right is just really really important to him.
And even though he knows his mother is dead, and why this is a Good Thing, and that Bellatrix would never have chosen redemption, and certainly not for Zuko, he always cries at the end of Return of the Jedi.
As his sister begins her own rise as a Dark Lord, Star Wars becomes even more important to him, not that he would ever say so, as he tries to convince his twin to come home and she tries to convince him to join her.
And he would be right there on opening day for The Force Awakens with Mai, you better believe it.
And Finn is his new fave?
Canon Zuko I think would have a much bigger love for Finn than Hufflepuff Zuko, since Hufflepuff Zuko was raised by the loving, supportive Iroh, and not as his father’s tool. No, Zuko’s heart goes out to Leia, and Kylo Ren being her son just kills him, because deep inside, he’s always going to be terrified that evil is in his blood and that one of his children will inherit it, and this kind of hits way too close to those fears.
So Hufflepuff Zuko doesn’t really identify with Finn because of how different his upbringing is from canon, but Mai Nott on the other hand… Mai got dragged to see this weird muggle moving picture thing, and she was kind of meh on the original trilogy, but she watches The Force Awakens and sees Finn getting out of the First Order, and leaving behind everything he was raised with, and all that control, and trying to grab everybody he cares for and run and get them somewhere safe, so that the people who controlled him for so long can’t hurt them, and oh, wow, suddenly she’s here for this.
5 headcanons on Hufflepuff Zuko post-Hogwarts, please?
Okay, this is post-story-timeline entirely, because some things are just too spoilery.
1. Slughorn is a very old man, and this is the second Dark Lord’s rise he’s lived through, (and the second Dark Lord he unwittingly mentored) and he is retiring, Minerva, really that’s it, no more. I don’t care if you don’t have a replacement lined up. Mai, who for various reasons that are spoilery, at this point can’t live with her parents, takes the job as a temporary measure until they can find someone better suited. Somehow they never do. Then McGonagal retires and Flitwick refuses the job, and poor Neville gets stuck with the thing, and he makes Mai’s appointment permanent three years into her being hired, and drops the Slytherin Head of House job in her lap too. Mai gets burned hard by Sughorn’s favoritism as a student and deeply resents him for it at the time, so she’s scrupulously fair as a teacher. She is also about half the school’s favorite teacher, because some days she walks in and looks at her students and says “Today we are blowing things up.”
2. Ty Lee and Suki both become professional athletes, in Quidditch and Football respectively. The year Ty Lee retires, she plays Seeker for Ireland and they win the World Cup. Both sisters are heavily involved in sports and children’s charities on their respective sides of the Wizarding Muggle divide. For a long long time, if their partners aren’t around, they share a room, because both of them have horrible nightmares from the war, and they feel better if they know their twin is there.
3. Aang wanted to be a professional Quidditch player, but he gets sidetracked by his wife’s efforts to reform Wizarding government, and ends up running for the Wizengamot and winning. He’s a war hero, so it’s not surprising. His pet causes are undoing the purebood hierarchy, squib rights, greater governmental accountability, and actually working to eliminate the global magical antiquities theft problem.
4. Katara becomes a healer and advocate for indigenous magical communities. She travels between the UK, where her husband is in office, and Canada where her family is from. She regularly skirts the edge of the International Statute of secrecy as she fights to get medical care and clean water to First Nations communities in Canada.
5. At the same time Mai is hired as Potions Professor at Hogwarts, Toph and Zuko are trainee Aurors. After the war with his sister, Zuko and Toph are eminently qualified dark wizard catchers, but Zuko is burned out on it. He uses his status as Auror, to with his boss’s approval, set up Wizarding children’s services. This is something near and dear to Harry’s heart too, for obvious reasons. In the end, Zuko runs for the Wizengamot on a pro-getting-wizarding-social-services-for-fuck’s-sake-also-I’m-a-war-hero platform and wins. He and Aang are parliamentarian contrarian buddies. He and Mai turn the Nott ancestral home into an emergency foster care center, and pretty much always have magical kids underfoot. Because she’s a teacher at Hogwarts, Mai is teaching or will teach nearly all of them. A few of them are there because she reported their parents.
I haven’t seen any HufflepuffZuko lately. Is that still ongoing?
Yes, Hufflepuff Zuko is still ongoing. I’m just very busy with school right now, and only noodling away at pretty much any fannish project I’ve got going. But you know what, Hufflepuff Zuko could use a Five Headcanons post.
1. Andromeda and Narcissa don’t know about Zuko and Azula. Bellatrix of course told neither of them, and the Ministry didn’t inform either of them either. The day Andromeda finds out about her niece and nephew is not going to be pretty.
2. This experience is going to be part of Zuko’s impetus for his quest to do something about the shambles Wizarding social services are in, seriously.
3. Andromeda finds out through Teddy, who is only a few years younger than Zuko and Azula, and has run into them a few times. He becomes good friends with Yue in his last couple of years of school, and it kind of hits him one day, oh yeah, her brother and guardian is uh, my cousin… Maybe I should let my grandmother know?
4. Narcissa never reaches out to Zuko. After a certain point, he figures she pretty much has to know about him, since he’s something of a public figure, and his marriage to Mai was a scandal in pureblood circles, but she never reaches out to her half-blood nephew with his severely tainted linage. After he goes into politics, Draco does however try to arrange a lunch. He stops trying to ingratiate himself after Zuko’s political leanings become clear.
5. There are still living Lestranges out there, but their position on the twins have always been that they are illegitimate, not related to the Lestranges, and have no right to the name. This isn’t exactly untrue, and they don’t seem like very nice people anyway, so Zuko never pursues it.
5 more Headcanons on Fire Prince Sokka and Water Tribe Azula?
Also known as the Akanna and Prince Sozin AU, continued from here: [Link], [Link], and [Link].
1. Culturally, the current climate of the Fire Nation is one of transition. Until recently, arranged marriages were the norm for the nobility, but more and more the ideal is becoming marriages that the parties choose themselves… provided both parties are still a good political match. This is the Royal Fire Academy for Girls’ primary selling point. They will take the girls of your acceptably noble family, educate them in arts, culture, battle tactics, the managing of a noble house, etiquette, etc., but most of all, they will be invited with her class to gatherings where she will meet young men of their own social standing in a sheltered, chaperoned, curated setting. It’s at one of these gatherings that six year old roommates Mai and Ty Lee first meet the princes.
2. Zuko and Mai are both grave and polite, and uncomfortable, and they do not click. Ty Lee and Sozin on the other hand… This is a tremendous coup for the young Ty Lee, though of course she doesn’t see it that way. Ty Lee and Sozin quickly become fast friends, and all the adults assume that one day the two will marry. Inevitably, they will eventually try to date, break up, and remain close. When they first meet Suki and abruptly find themselves falling for the same girl, many things become clear for Ty Lee. Anyway, this friendship keeps Mai and Zuko in the same orbit, and someday the Academy will get to say that the Firelord and Firelady met at one of their gatherings.
3. With Ozai favoring neither of his children, and blatantly attempting to produce another attempted heir, politics in the Fire Nation court is more of a life-threatening gamble than ever. Cozying up to the princes risks angering Ozai, and Ozai… Of course there are still women and their families willing to marry the Firelord, but many women and their families have realized what should be obvious to all, that the Firelord is dangerous, deadly, and unpleasable. His first wife bore him two healthy sons, one a bending prodigy, and he had her banished. He has killed two wives for miscarriages. At the time the Avatar awakens, he is married to a twenty year old, less than half his age.
4. Incidentally, she survives the war, probably because Zuko and Sozin conquer Ba Sing Se, causing Ozai to focus his attention on them as possibly worthy heirs after all.
5. Sozin hits something of a firebending block when he’s twelve. Suddenly the fear of failure, the idea that he even could fail with regards to bending, that Zuko has known his whole life, catches up to him. It takes him years to regain his inventiveness and confidence, and willingness to experiment, and his joy in bending.
Alternate universe wherein Toph and Mai meet first. (I was thinking that it was a way to gain favor and hopefully not be attacked by the fire nation on the part of the Bei Fong parents and a business and supplies deal on the part of Mai’s parents.) Whether this becomes ToMai, Maiko, or ToMaiKo, I’ll leave up to you. Five Headcannons?
1. Mai’s father has been angling for a position in the colonial government for most of his career. It’s the best place for an old blood noble, with next to no money left to his name to make a fortune. While Mai is in school, his wife stays with her in the Fire Nation capital, and Mai usually spends her breaks with the Princess. But this time is different. Her father has just been appointed governor of Omashu, and on the way, he wants to bring her with him to negotiate with the family of a wealthy collaborator.
2. The Bei Fong estate is beautiful, and immense, and Mai can see her father actually vibrating with envy. She can see the glint in her mother’s eye as she schemes to find a way to wrest everything she sees out of the hands of an Earth Kingdom family. It’s hard for Mai to summon up any emotion other than vague disgust and boredom.
3. At dinner, her father speaks openly of her friendship with the princess, and their family’s old Fire Nation lineage, hinting that he might be willing to marry her to a wealthy Earth Kingdom man after the conquest. So long as he isn’t a bender of course. Mai decides she can’t deal with him anymore and slips away from the table, and out to the garden. That’s where she meets a little girl in the silks and finery of an Earth Kingdom noble.
4. “You’re wearing a lot of knives,” the girl says. “Are you an assassin?” “How did you know about my knives?” Mai shoots back. They talk about shitty families and being bored, and running away, and when she has to go back inside, she ignores her father’s lecture, thinking.
5. In less than a month, she and the girl will face off against each other, and she will spend many a silent night after Azula and Ty Lee have gone to sleep, pondering their conversation.
Do you have an AU where there’s at least a decade worth age gap between Zuko and Azula?
I do not in fact.
1. The first thing to do with an AU like this is to decide which of the Fire sibs I am going to base everybody else’s ages and certain key events on. And the answer is Zuko’s, which means the war comes to an end when Azula is only six years old.
2. Azula is a newborn when her mother is banished, and for the first six years of her life, she is fed her father’s subtle insinuations that Ursa never understood him, and she never would have understood what a prize, what a treasure Azula is. Yet in spite of Ozai’s efforts, Azula is acutely aware of the loss of her mother, and that it’s Zuko’s fault, that for the sake of her worthless brother, her mother left her as a baby. She bitterly resents him for this, even after he is banished too and she finds herself missing him with an unexpected vehemence.
3. Speaking of Zuko’s banishment, three year old Azula is in the audience that day, and she watches her father set fire to her brother’s face. She is close enough to smell the cooking flesh. She screams and buries her face in her uncle’s chest, and sobs, not even sure why she’s crying. Isn’t it just Zuko? Isn’t it just her worthless failure of a brother? Part of it is the shock of course, at the violence, and the sheer horror of it, but underneath that is the sudden instinctive knowledge that if Ozai is willing to do that to his son, then he would be willing to do it to his daughter. Any sense of safety she had before vanishes with her brother.
4. for weeks, Azula refuses to leave her room. She refuses to speak to her father, and she hides from her nannies. They have to force her into the bathtub and pin her down to brush her hair, and when they pick her up and carry her out of the room to her father, she bites the hand of one of her nannies hard enough to draw blood. Ozai snaps at her that if she wants her brother back that much, when she’s Firelord she can allow him home, but her brother will just disappoint her. Eventually though, Azula calms down. Ozai’s patience and hope is rewarded when Azula reveals herself to be a firebending protegy, and as she begins to show the first glimmers of the cunning and strategic ruthlessness her father if anything prizes more highly than simple firebending.
5. And then her world collapses around her again. Somehow Zuko sneaks into the royal palace of Ba Sing Se, and used the confusion of the Avatar’s visit to conquer the city and capture the Avatar, and he’s coming home.
Could we have more of that combustion man au?
Continued from here: [Link] and here: [Link]
1. Zuko is not stupid. He has known for years what his father wants from him. He has known that if he goes along with it, in a decade or so, he could become head Fire Sage, and that someday, he would be the one to crown his sister Firelord. He understands this.
2. He doesn’t know what to do now. He has been captured and he knows there is no hope of rescue. He has no idea what to do with the life and the choices he has right now. It wouldn’t be so bad, he supposes, asking Chief Arnook for asylum, as Arnook has told him over and over he can. He could build a life here. It’s not like he has a life back home in the Fire Nation waiting for him. He wouldn’t have to worry about going home and trying to fight, and figure out what he should become, and if he even wants out of the trap his father has set for him. It could be so easy. But instead he’s just frozen and silent.
3. Back in the Fire Nation Ozai reacts to his brother’s disappearance with rage. He orders his brother’s apprehension and return to the Fire Nation. His brother is not well, he tells the nation through gritted teeth. He should have been in a hospital, but Ozai softheartedly tried to have him treated in the palace. Sadly his condition makes him dangerous. Fire Nation soldiers should take no risks when attempting to capture him and return him home.
4. Pakku fills Iroh in on how his nephew has been doing. He tells him that Zuko is well cared for and safe, and Iroh tells him to his shame that he is unable to ensure the same for him. But he also tells Iroh about Zuko’s total silence and blank expression, and about the way that Arnook says he just sits there. He doesn’t tell Iroh that Arnook tries to dote on the boy as a way to stave off mourning for his daughter, or the lost look the Chief has described in his eyes sometimes when he thinks no one is looking at him.
5. Pakku also tells Iroh that Zuko is not well guarded. He has made no attempts to escape, so there is no real point, especially since Arnook is reluctant to keep him prisoner at all. Iroh goes to his nephew’s room, wakes him up, takes him by the hand and leads him down to his boat, and they set a course for the open sea.
Cheloneuniverse 