Full Metal Bitch Prompt Mini-Meme
Nov. 18th, 2010 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lavanya_sixFor those of you who aren't familiar with the fic, Full Metal Bitch is an in-progress AtLA Alternative Universe fic based on one simple change -- When the Gaang encounter Toph in Season Two, she is not twelve, but twenty-two.
RULES
1. Each commentator can submit up to THREE PROMPTS, of which I will pick ONE to fill. Note: You must be signed in to receive a fill. No anonymous requests.
2. All prompts must be set in the FMB!Verse.
3. In addition to writing "missing scenes" from Full Metal Bitch, I'll also do AUs to the fic if requested. Please remember that the more specific/complex your request, the harder it will be for me to write and thus the less likely I am to fill it.
4. Please do not request anything set at any point in Season 2 between episode 2x07 ("Zuko Alone") and episode 2x20 ("The Crossroads of Destiny") All that will eventually be covered in the actual fic itself.
Requests Made: 4/5
Requests Filled: 3/4
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Date: 2010-11-22 12:39 pm (UTC)2. AU. Ice cold Bitch (& lone wolf). It's not Toph's family whose aged, it's Sokka and Katara's. Keep the general bitter/badass tone though.
3. Darkfic. Toph takes a second "son" from Iroh.
It's not Toph's family whose aged, it's Sokka and Katara'. [1/1]
Date: 2010-11-23 11:59 pm (UTC)They left her behind, at first.
The survivors would return from battle covered in blood and burns. Katara did important work with her healer's hands, saved men's lives from death or debilitating injuries. She practiced the other uses her waterbending had but Dad and Sokka refused her utterly on that matter. It wasn't that she was woman, they said, it was that her healing ability was irreplaceable. Fathers would live to see their families because of her. How could she risk that?
But nothing in war goes according to plan. One night a platoon of firebenders attacks their beachside camp, setting fire to their ships, hoping to press the Southern Water Tribe against the waves and destroy them. They don't count on Katara having the ocean at her disposal. She saves the ships while the sands run red with icewater mixed with blood.
Katara isn't left behind after that.
But she's still never quite one of them, either. While the other warriors talk around the campfire about their absent families or memories of home, she stays silent. Katara misses the beautiful desolation of the South Pole, sure, but she comes to realize a part of her would be perfectly fine with never going back. It's not that she loves war. She hates it, loathes it in the way only a battlefield healer can. But Sokka and Dad are with her, and wherever her family is... that's home.
Katara has no one waiting for her back at the South Pole.
Even accepting the attrition the menfolk faced because of raids, finding a husband had been harder than Katara had ever expected. Not that she'd given it much thought. Katara had just assumed she'd find the right man, that she'd just look at him and know he was the One.
Being a chief's daughter probably wouldn't have hurt either, she once supposed, considering how many girls had courted Sokka for an alliance between their respective tribes. Yet no parents wanted Katara as their daughter-in-law. People, she eventually learned, steered their sons clear of her.
Dad might have been an important chieftain but Katara had a single, overwhelming mark against her: she was a waterbender.
Any children she bore would have a fair chance of inheriting of her gift, which made them and their home village a potential target for Fire Nation raids. Without any mastery of her waterbending she didn't offer any 'benefits' for the danger involved in a marriage match, as Gran-Gran had bluntly put it.
While she had gone unwed even at 24, Sokka had fathered twin daughters with his wife Corazon when they were both seventeen. Their girls were waterbenders. Katara sometimes wondered what Sokka and her sister-in-law thought about their children's future, but they'd never broached the subject so she respected that silence.
Sometimes, in her quiet moments, a tiny voice nagged at Katara that the only reason Dad had allowed to come to war was so his granddaughters would have potentially an experienced waterbending teacher.
Re: It's not Toph's family whose aged, it's Sokka and Katara'. [1/1]
Date: 2010-11-24 05:42 pm (UTC)She'd probably try to take Aang alone. Justifying it because she's teaching him, but it's really a sort of petty revenge. Look at me, I'm teaching the Avatar, he's going to save the world, don't you wish you'd paid attention to me.
Which probably means she's going to act one of those pushy soccer moms from hell. As Aang's value reflects on her. Of course, it might throw her for a loop when he shows he's a lot wiser than she thinks.
Re: It's not Toph's family whose aged, it's Sokka and Katara'. [1/1]
Date: 2010-11-24 05:45 pm (UTC)Re: It's not Toph's family whose aged, it's Sokka and Katara'. [1/1]
Date: 2010-11-24 06:46 pm (UTC)There have been a few "Aang doesn't get unfrozen" fics, but I don't recall one that ever addressed the issue of Katara marrying. Usually she's just single and that's never remarked on. I figured that in a Fire Empire world, marrying an untrained waterbender wouldn't look like too attractive an option. (Meanwhile, in such fics, Sokka seems to always end up with Suki or Toph.)
I figure Aang would probably be freed by Sokka's daughters, assuming the stations of the canon are in motion. Originally I was going to work Aang in by making Sokka take Bato's place in "Bato of the Water Tribe" at that nunnery. Katara would have stayed behind to monitor his recovery. But I just did a drabble with a similar set-up in "That Father Lost, Lost His" and didn't want to repeat myself.
>Also, finding a husband is going to suck for her. There are no 17-30 year olds in avatar, at all. I honestly cannot think of a one. It's the kids/early teens, then come adults, then the old guys. But between early teen and adult, there is zip, nadda, nothing.
Not only that, but she's hardly in a position to romance any of the eligible bachelors among the war party with her Dad (the chieftain) and overprotective brother running interception.
The lack of visible 17-30 year olds in Avatar is something I always chalked up to the war's attrition. All the people in that age group? They're either civilians or army mooks. That's why you only have teenage prodigies (Katara/Toph/Azula/Sokka) and old masters (Pakku/Bumi/Iroh/Piandao). If the teen prodigies aren't good enough or lucky enough, the war cuts them down before they reach middle age. Then they spend twenty years raising children and recovering from the horrors of war.
In FMB proper, Toph is one of those teenage prodigies who barely managed to make it to adulthood. While the war's crucible made her a frighteningly skilled earthbender, it also messed her up in the head pretty badly. If the Gaang hadn't stumbled across her, she would have ended up either drinking herself to death or she'd have turned into the bastard child of Jeong-Jeong and Howard Hughes.
Re: It's not Toph's family whose aged, it's Sokka and Katara'. [1/1]
Date: 2010-11-25 12:43 am (UTC)Re: It's not Toph's family whose aged, it's Sokka and Katara'. [1/1]
Date: 2010-11-26 03:39 am (UTC)