#mywiptag

She had captained The Last Airbender ever since she found it frozen and abandoned in ice when she was a girl. Hers was the fastest ship on the ocean. It was engineered, through repairs, in part by her brother—her first mate and her favored back to have to hers in a firefight. Some sailors claimed The Last Airbender sometimes flew over the water since the wind was forever partial to its sails, orange and always pulled taut like a glider by insistent breezes.

Katara and her crew made their living reacquiring airbender artifacts that the Fire Nation looted from the ruined holy sites—now mass graves—that were once the Temples that housed her Tribe’s closest companions and allies.

No one knew why the Fire Nation wanted the Air Nomad’s relics, especially after they had collected a hundred years of dust.

It didn’t matter, though.

If the Fire Nation wanted it, Katara wouldn’t let them have it.

Besides, tonight was promising. The moon was full, their hearts were heavy with song, and, if the security on board the black navy ship was anything to go by, this night’s haul looked like a good one. The older men of her crew hadn’t seen an entourage like that since they were boys apprenticing under their fathers (before the Fire Nation rebranded her people’s trade and branded them all pirates...But her people were nothing if not honest, so they became exactly what the Fire Nation feared.)

There was a firefight and a storm from hell, and Katara couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed by the wind. It usually warned her of such things by feeding her the smells of lightning and pregnant storm clouds.

She labeled the wind a traitor when she was knocked overboard.

She cursed it a thousand times over when a cyclone turned her world black.

Katara woke up surrounded by dead plants, debris, and dead relics—loaded in splintered crates—of a dead nation. The wind greeted her like an awkward friend and welcomed her to an island from nowhere.

’The Boy in the Box’—as Katara had come to call him—had eyes like pirate’s silver and was as much a living relic as Katara had ever seen.

“Will you go sealturtle surfing with me?”

Well, at least Katara had friendly company to help her search for The Last Airbender.

.

.

No one had picked up their jaw yet.

Lin left to get a drink, some painkillers, and something to punch, in exactly that order.

Because Avatar Aang was rocking baby Rohan and talking to Pema like it was just another Tuesday morning, and Meelo, Jinorah, and Ikki were clinging to the past Avatar like moss on a tree.

And Lin was not going to handle two teen Avatars while she was still sober.

It’s the ATLA/TLOK crossover we all deserve, and I am having such a blast writing it it isn’t even funny. Aang with the Krew and his grandbabies and his kids and modern technology is glorious.

Basically, through a series of events (don’t wanna give too much away there lol), Korra stumbles upon a post-The Search Aang. Shenanigans and plot and feels ensue, especially since no one tells Aang who they are or where he truly is at first. There’s an alternate beginning to this story that I have half-written that I love and almost went with instead, but I’ll probabibly post it as its own separate thing.

Chaos from the older gaang of course if for no other reason than because I refuse to believe that Suki is dead.

And I’ll be damned if I don’t squeeze in as much bestdad!Aang as I can because my God young Aang being anxious about being a father gets me right where it hurts, and to be sure there will be conversations between Aang and the adults who he doesn’t realize are his kids (here’s a draft-snippet of the scene I’m currently working on):

He smiled even though he was crying, and his face looked like a sun shower. His voice trembled just as badly as his lip when he spoke. “I know they’ll hate me, but that’s okay. They’ll have Katara. And they’ll have Sokka and Toph and Zuko and Suki. T-They can teach them the things that they won’t want to learn from me. And that’s okay. Isn’t it?” He looked up at them. His smile was smaller, but he was crying harder. “Isn’t it? I mean, I was kindof hoping that they would go penguin sledding with me, but they might not want to. But that’s okay, too. Katara can do it way better than me—and they’ll love Katara. Katara is Katara. Yeah. I-It’s okay. Perfectly okay.”

Also a WIP of one of the panels of the comic-to-be so also also enjoy this lil precious airbean in a grocery cart

Happy Friday!!! This snippet is from a littleshit!Aang fic that I’ve been plotting for a while (Really short snippet, but tbh one of my favorite lines that I’ve ever written☺️):

I don’t wanna say what it is, but Azula names it Pita and for a very specific reason (in other words, guess who dug into some mythos and found and then made something better than a dragon☺️).

Fat drops of rain pelted Azula’s back like a shower of stones. She shivered. The cold dug under her skin and wrapped frozen manacles around her bones.

The mass of mud and soft cries shivered just as hard as her. Filth and fur squelched between Azula’s fingers as she picked it up.

“You’re pathetic,” she said. She held the small creature to her chest. It cuddled into one of the holes of her tunic. “An absolute disgrace. Too weak to keep going but too stubborn to die.”

It curled against her chest, just above her breast.

It was searching for her heartbeat.

...It was searching for its mother.

Azula sneered and held it like she was cradling the very last of her fire. “...No wonder your family left you behind.”

Why must you give me such a hard decision. So many cries so little time~

Admittedly, it’s harder than I thought to splice out a cry-section since the whole fic contributes. I tried😭

This is a spoiler-free part of the third and final part of “I’m Here”, which is a three-part fic about whistle-speak being a secret language of the airbenders and how it affects Aang and the Protective!Gaang:

...Aang sits at the pai sho table most afternoons. The quiet clap of the wooden tiles stays away the silence. He moves the pieces with little direction but in a loose pattern like he had rehearsed it. He always cheats himself.

Iroh sits with him and plays. They nurse cups of tea as their backs bake warmly in the sun. Whenever Iroh makes a joke that he laughs at himself for, Aang grins, just a bit, and moves his next piece with a more confident clap of lacquer and wood. The laughter sparks back into his eyes, but only for a while. It dies like a candle’s small flame whenever the wind so much as glances them. He still doesn’t say anything, and he loses every game.

Aang had never sought out Zuko’s uncle before, but now he does it all the time. Iroh speaks to him. His advice always helps.

Aang’s family breathes a sigh of relief but can’t help but feel uneasy.

Aang’s shoulders curl to his ears.

None of them know why.

Katara knows. She doesn’t tell the others. She swallows hot embers whenever Aang thumbs the smooth grain of a Pia Sho piece under the table. Aang looks not at Iroh, but through him, and his hollow smile wants to cry.

Katara stands closer to her brother. She recognizes that look. It aches her like a scar.

No worries, my friend!! (I'm sorry for not getting to this earlier🙏 I was very busy Friday, and I got absorbed by bestdad!Aang over the weekend)

The Momo fic is almost done, yes, but not quite enough for me to give a snippet (because it may be subject to change as I edit). I do, however, have another WIP one-shot from the ask you're referring to that is almost done!

It's called ’Healing Session’, but I'm thinking of switching the title to ’In Sickness and in Health’. It's...considerably longer than I anticipated, to say the least😅. It's inspired by this hc post by @roselevesque about how Aang would 100% learn to heal from Katara post-series:

“Aaang…”

Katara dug into the reserves of her patience and burrowed her heels into the trenches of her will. Both were loose and softened into muddy slopes that Aang’s hug—which stained his knees green with crushed grass when he slid into her with the grace and grappling power of a throwing net—made all the more slippery to hold onto.

His robes were under her nose and brought to Katara the smells of moonpeach pollen and worn leather. His face was her whole world in the next second. His brow pressed to hers—his eyes a steely ocean she wanted to drown herself in. Katara’s twitching grin labeled her scowl a traitor, and the brat refusing to sit across from her flashed a smile like a victor’s flag.

She shot him a look, but he side-stepped her warning shot with the haphazard ease of an old soldier running through arrows and hellfire. He held her a little tighter and kissed her all the more, planting his flag and concluding his conquest, before he surrendered to the hand pushing him away.

“Aang, sit still. This is serious.”

Katara’s words carried too much of her smile to make an impact on Aang. She deployed an armored scowl. She should have expected his smile to take it as a challenger to outshine.

The sun’s warmth didn’t hold a candle to the feeling his giggle flushed her with.

“You. Still.”

“I am. I am,” Aang said. He wasn’t, and he didn’t for nearly another minute. Ocean mist, sharp and lingering brine on the back of Katara’s tongue, was her only distraction. The butterflies in her stomach couldn’t be contained as the polarbeardog-pup in human flesh kissed her cheek one last time and curled—finally—into a cross-legged position.

The distance between them could hardly be called distance. Aang was older and theoretically wiser, but anyone looking in would think he hadn’t seen her in a lifetime, even though they met in the same spot at the same time every day.

Aang saluted and puffed his chest. His eyes were full of a life he was more than happy to put in her hands. “Whenever you’re ready, Sifu Katara!”

Katara was going to give herself a debilitating injury if she rolled her eyes any longer or harder.

The ocean clapped against the jutting black stones below.