I'm not occult, I'm ethereal!

Happy mušḫuššu monday everybody

But I was thinking just now...

Literally no one in the friend group aside from Aang knows Zuko was the Blue Spirit

So do you think... they're just hanging out in the palace post canon all piled up in one of the rooms reserved for when the royal family wants to chill—and Zuko is voicing his (extremely reasonable) upset about his father for one reason or another

And Sokka just says something like, "So are you gonna just leave him to rot in jail for the rest of his life, or are you gonna give him another punishment?"

And Zuko goes quiet. Thinking. Then he says, "Maybe I should send him on a quest to capture the Blue Spirit to regain his honor"

“She stood out in the crowd, a bit older than most of the women, her light brown hair pinned up on the top of her head in a loose, Gibson Girl style. A long frilly pink dress with a tiny floral print covered her soft, slightly plump body. It wasn’t even a hippie dress, which was about all you could get away with back then. And she wore matching pink lipstick when absolutely no one else, lesbian, bi, or straight, was even wearing makeup. There was hardly a woman there in anything but jeans.”

the narrator’s friend Dana keeps laughing at her just out of eyeshot, and the narrator is immediately viscerally uncomfortable— “The femme was heading right toward me. I looked down at the table to avoid any eye contact that might invite her over”—  and she’s barely anything more than polite when the femme gives her a dollar and asks for a kiss.

“Oh, wait till the girls hear this one, I thought. Yet I found that my heart was beating a bit too fast. My friends, and the other women who’d paid their dollar to kiss me, had all given me playful, mostly dry pecks. But the femme was a bar dyke, and I wondered if she knew about the unspoken rules of the game at the Women’s Center.”

the femme is also cross-eyed, so one of her eyes lists a bit to the center when she looks at the narrator, who finds it unsettling. we get all sorts of discursive coding for the femme (physically, socially) that paint her as the wrong kind of other, the kind we don’t want to invite over (much less kiss). 

but the narrator wants the dollar, so she reluctantly kisses her, with her friends watching and laughing from the other side of the room. She’s very aware that since the femme is a femme, that this is probably not going to be the kind of chaste, ironic, and most importantly non-sexual peck that she’s gotten from all of her friends— women she knows, that she approves of, most of whom are now mocking her from the sidelines.

and it’s a hell of a kiss. we get a full page of kissing. it’s the best damn kiss this shrinking violet of a narrator has ever gotten in her life. by the time she’s finished she’s out of breath and more turned on than she’s been in her entire life, and when she looks the femme in the eyes afterwards, she thinks “Her eyes were fascinating. I could see now that the cast was quite charming, almost beautiful.”

“When I looked up, I saw that Dana and Robin had worked their way over to us and had moved in behind her, pretending to be next in line. Please let her walk off without seeing them laugh at her, I prayed.

She nodded good-bye to me and turned around to face them. “Worth a lot more than a dollar, girls. Be gentle with her now,” she said as she picked up her purse and walked away.”