I saw your “Zuko brings home two dragons and becomes fire lord” story (it was awesome :3). But what if Zuko got hurt somehow and the dragons went apeshit. (Cause they’re friends right?)
(Continued from this prompt.)
Hakoda’s fleet set sail six months ago. Fire Lord Ozai was assassinated in the middle of his own war council, by his own son, two months ago. The Earth Kingdom contacted Hakoda three weeks ago, with the proposal for a joint operation.
The new Fire Lord is traveling his lands, securing allies—rooting out opposition—in the wake of his regicide. A source close to his inner council, one concerned by violence uncommon even by the standards of Fire Nation nobility, leaked his travel schedule. Much of it is by sea.
They skirt the blockade to the South, between shifting glaciers. They work their way north, flying merchant flags. They strike at night. The deck crew is easily overtaken. Understaffed, even. Suspiciously so. But if this is a trap, it’s one they’ve already sprung. And if this is the work of the same traitor that sent them the prince’s schedule and ship plans, then Hakoda won’t waste the opportunity.
“Wait,” he whispers, as Bato catches a startled servant from behind. The kid is young. In his nightclothes. Freshly scarred by his nation’s own fire, in a way that doesn’t say good things about why a young child would be coming out of the Fire Lord’s own cabin in the middle of the night. Wide gold eyes stare at Hakoda over the top of Bato’s muffling hand.
“Son of a—” hisses Bato, as quietly as a man can, when a child has just bitten his hand. The kid keeps struggling as Bato pins him against a wall. Hakoda shoves the Fire Lord’s door open, and—
Is greeted by an empty cabin, with mussed sheets, still warm from their occupant’s departure.
Hakoda steps back into the passageway, and crouches down to the kid’s eye level. “Easy; we aren’t here to hurt you. Where’s the Fire Lord?”
The kid glowers at him. “Did General Bujing hire you?”
Footsteps down the companionway herald a much different general’s arrival. “That would be telling,” says Fong. “Excellent work, Chief. We’ll take it from here.”
…Facts click into place, and Hakoda does not like what he’s left with.
The kid is the Fire Lord.
The Fire Lord is barely thirteen.
And Hakoda is realizing how much of their intelligence on the monstrous patricidal new Fire Lord came through Earth Kingdom channels, and how many details Fong did not find pertinent for the Water Tribe’s easily recruited Chief to know.
“I think we can keep one kid contained on our ship,” says Bato, who also saw the cell General Fong had specially prepared. It had seemed a reasonable cruelty, at the time.
“I’ll bite you again,” growls the Fire Nation’s tiniest despot, not helping.
There’s a tense moment as Hakoda’s men, finished securing the ship, gather around him. Just as Fong’s men are gathering around him.
“Very well,” the general concedes, with a smile Hakoda no longer finds affable.
* * *
The new Fire Lord is a man of his word: he does, indeed, bite Bato again.
* * *
It’s dawn on deck. They hurry the prince off his own ship, partially to get away from Fong, and partially to move the boy past his dead countrymen as quickly as possible. The kid’s face had been—
Hakoda had not expected to find the new Fire Lord so young. But it’s even more of a surprise, somehow, to find that the new Fire Lord cares. Not all of the kid’s crew are dead. And it wasn’t the plan, but… Hakoda orders them left that way. Sends his own healer over to save as many as possible.
“You didn’t use your fire against us,” Hakoda comments, as they stand on his own ship. Fire Lord Zuko’s eyes are fixed on the triage happening on the next deck over. But he takes a moment to look up at Hakoda, and finds a shade even paler than white to turn.
The healing burn over his own face was a partial answer. The look on his face gives Hakoda the rest.
“Good,” Hakoda says, even though the kid hasn’t said anything. “Fire shouldn’t be turned on people.”
“Fire is life,” the boy says quietly, in some kind of agreement. He turns back to watching his crew, his people. Those of them that can be saved.
Hakoda knows that feeling. Has stood that watch.
It’s dawn, so a streak of red in the sky can go unnoticed for quite some time. Blue as well, as the morning’s colors fade. Until both are rather too close to be ignored.
Exclamations spread among the crew. He can hear them from Fong’s ship, as well. But it’s the cheering on the Fire Lord’s ship that sends the first chill down his spine.
The new Fire Lord is barely thirteen. And he hasn’t been scared at all during this; not for himself.
Hakoda realizes again just how little he knows about the new Fire Lord, just in time for two dragons to land. The blue one dives into the water. It barely makes a splash, but the force of water its titanic body displaces sends his ship lurching under his feet. It surfaces again, the great coils of its body wrapped around all three ships. It’s like something from a drunken sailor’s yarn about sea serpents; the kind that shouldn’t have left any witnesses alive to tell the tale.
The red one lands almost daintily, its four feet touching down on the only ship it doesn’t care about sinking, like a polar bear-ferret perched on a too-small rock. The rails of General Fong’s ship are forced down nearly to the waterline, his crew scattering and shouting.
Two heads the size of a god’s dreaming loom over Hakoda’s deck.
The boy next to him huffs. “I’m fine,” he says. And then he looks up at Hakoda, with that same confidence he’s had, even when he was tackled by strange men in the darkness of his own ship.
“The war is over,” says the burned child, with the force of two ancient dragons behind him. “We should negotiate.”
…Hakoda negotiates.
(Read more prompts || Longer ATLA fics || Original works)
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I want piercer Dabi and I want him NOW!!!!!!!!!!……
I just think he’d have such a terrible reputation for being so standoffish and unfriendly and rude with the customers, but it’s only from the WIMPS!!! and when you go in, nervous but excitable and jittery, he can’t help but lay on that Dabi ‘charm’ that typically leaves him a nasty review online.
but you love it because he’s low key hilarious and makes you feel so comfortable with how open and honest he is about everything. breaks your heart tho when he tells you that certain piercings aren’t compatible with your anatomy but makes up for it by offering up another piercing for half off the pricing!!
you get your lip pierced, and he’s holding your jaw with a surprising amount of gentleness. turns you this way and that before he tuts that he’s gonna give you a vertical labret instead of the snake bites you originally came in for, tells you how the former is much cooler, how pretty you’ll look with it. he’s so cheeky, pulls your bottom lip down with his thumb, a ‘requirement’ to make sure your lip won’t reject the piercing (he can’t tell this way, he just wants to touch you and watch how clouded your eyes get).
he’s full of praise but only for his best customers (just you). calls you good and sweet and a little crybaby, but only when you whine or whimper. tells you how good you take it for him, smirks when he watches your thighs shift and clench against each other.
oooooohhhh and imagine you want a tattoo too and he does them as well????? hour long sessions of a bat winged heart as a tramp stamp that he can’t help but drool over. the way you’re bent over, how you moan a little in discomfort, look back over your shoulder to see your progress. he’s hard the entire session, and convinces you to come back for another long, detailed tattoo in a risqué area just so he can see you, smell you, feel you again. whore.
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