Toph: Quick, Snoozles! Its another solar eclipse! Punch the nearest firebender in the face while they’re still weak!
Azula: Yeah, Sokka. Come and get it.
Sokka: Okay.
Sokka: *kisses Azula*
Azula: I win again.
Toph: Damn it Sokka!
“And then we just, uh, what did you call it? Sway?” he smiled, pulling her ever so closely as they danced to the rhythm of a timeless song.
She loosened up, step by gentle step, her hands clasping his, silent among the crowd of green-cladded dancers swaying under a warm starry night, jade and crimson lanterns hanging from above as the tune elicited fantasies she never dreamed of, “Is this what its like when there are no wars to fight?”
“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully, “Its new for me too… I wish it can always stay this way.”
“Are you high? Again?” questioned Azula, picking up the chipped tea glass on the floor, sniffing the rim, “And off cactus juice no less!”
“Azula, life is an obese empress walking backwards into a cucumber, so you should just pretend and not loose sleep over your parents’ milk,” Sokka blabbered, his words hopelessly slurred as he wrapped and arm around her shoulder, “That way you can get eternity back and be the reason why other people feel purple.”
Oh, she knew this was a stupid idea pouring herself a cup of juice, but her day was bleak and perhaps an inexplicable choice made in the company of her lover, high off of an impossible sense of joy she greatly envied, may make the evening just a bit more bearable, “Cheers, or whatever.”
“No you can’t!” said Sokka, incensed by her apparent audacity.
With a tilt of her head and clever smirk, Azula leaned forward and kissed him, thrilled by the taste of his lips and the lack of a response. “Yes, I can.”
“Ha! You call that an attack!? Your Hokuto Boomerang-Ken style barely gave me a headache, you little bastard!” yelled the snow bandit, unsheathing his own massive boomerang as he prepared to strike, “Now you’ll see how its really done!”
“Hmph! You are already dead,” sneered Sokka, sheathing his boomerang.
At that instant, as the bandit’s head suddenly caved-in, his very skull exploding in a gruesome red haze as blood spattered the snow, Azula eye’s widened in disbelief, “What… the fuck just happened?”
“Mother dearest, do you know where we keep the jar of sopophorous beans and valerian roots? Fratele Meu* and I want to make a potion for you!”, said Gretel, with the sweetest of smiles.
“Yes, Sora Mea** and I noticed you had trouble sleeping, so we thought we could help you!” said Hansel, eager to aid his scarred mother in any way he could.
Balalaika, despite the aching fatigue that she stoically endured for the sake of her twisted family of wizard-killers, black-potion makers, and poachers, saw through her children’s false gestures of kindness, “…serve me a cup of the Draught of Living Death, and I break your necks.”
* = “brother dear” in Romanian
** = “sister dear” in Romanian
Please, pleeeeaaase, somebody tell me they got the references for both of them.
She could feel his warm breath on the back of her neck and as his soft lips laid claim to her skin his hand reach out from behind her, lifting her plaid skirt.
“Some challenge,” she purred, her breath hitching at the feel of his stiffened cock rubbing against her ass, “You hardly stood a chance.”
“True,” he said, another hand reaching up toward her neck, tugging roughly at her little tie, “And neither did you.”
@purpleplatypusbear21 – I, uh, yeah! This is, uh, clearly them competing for valedictorian! So much tension, you know. Much stress. XD
Neon filtered through the
blinds in his window and the heavy, rhythmic beat of the nearby night club
pulsed through the walls and resonated through his body, chasing away the
silence of his room. Party-goers cheered over the beat, celebrating the coming
of night, freed from the day’s grind.
To Sokka, it was just
another night for him. Work didn’t end with the setting sun and his clients
always preferred the safety of the dark to conduct their business.
His phone vibrated on the
nearby nightstand. He smirked in the mirror as he straightened his black tie
and matted out the creases in his blue dress shirt.
It was painful just to breathe, clinging to life by the tendons of his shattered lungs, the heavy plasti-steel chest piece punctured and torn to bloody shards as he laid motionless in the crater.
Peering through the fractured steel visor of his helmet, Sokka looked toward the sky, the relentless heat of the sun filtered through a red and black haze as his vision blurred in and out of focus. Shapes lost their form, the world was slowly untethered.
Blood pooled in his mouth, the heavy copper taste on his slack tongue. Weakly, he attempted to breathe through his clotted nose, the smell of his inevitable death looming closer, mixed with the scent of smoke and burning palm leaves.
Slow and numbing. He wanted to cry. He would never see home again.
He gurgled, blinked. Red tracer fire screamed over his head. Pillars of dirt and sand lifted into the air around him, the vibration of dozens of impacts shaking the ground beneath him. He felt his tattered body and bones crack within his own armor.
And then… she came.
Just a lumbering, armored shadow that blotted out the sun, hunched over him as the tracers raced overhead.
Her voice was like a whisper from a half-remembered dream as she leaned down and touched his helmet with an armored, automotive hand.
“Hey. There’s something I’ve been wanting ask you.”
He wheezed as he choked on his blood. Sokka willed his arms to move, trying to make the actuators in his metal exoskeleton come to life. Warning signals and messages screeched in his headphones. His very blood seemed slow. He felt so numb, so useless.
“… is it true what they say? About the green tea they serve in Japan at the end of the year?”
A blinding flash. The earth shook. Chunks of dirt pattered his armor and visor, getting in his glossy eyes. She’d be buried in this grave with him if she didn’t move.
She breathed, as calmly as she could, “Do you really get the tea for free?”
Tea.
He never liked it.
A beer out on the porch, watching the sun set over the sea, the stars coming out – that was his drink.
But the earthy taste of green tea. Warm on his tongue, soul-soothing, bundled up in a nice cozy shop as he watched the snow fall through foggy glass, couples out in the cold waiting for the bells to welcome the new year.
If she’d only stayed that night…
“… hfff… hfff… yffs…”
Yes.
His eyes felt as if they would rend apart, torn by the sheer pain as he struggled to look at the shadowy figure leaning above him. Her armored exoskeleton was black. She clutched the handle of something massive behind her – an axe, a sword, Sokka couldn’t tell.
She was a hard steel beast. A gun-metal demon with a voice like an angel, filtered through a helmet mic.
“I’m Azula Sakhalin, soldier. I’ll stay with you until you die.”
He could have sworn he saw gold eyes through her visor.
Gold. Huh.
There was white light. And then nothing.
Loop six.
Shit.
That was only his sixth time as far as he knew. And every death seemed more gruesome, more futile, more stark, less and less like a sequence of half-forgotten dreams.
He was stuck, unable to break the grim cycle he found himself in, suffering death after agonizing death.
And there she would be. Hovering over him, patient like the grim reaper.
As Sokka sat up in his cot, raking his fingers through his hair as the shock of yet another death slowly faded from his mind, he couldn’t help but ask one question.
This one is a long one. Click “keep reading” for more.
The latches disconnected and with a deafening clang as the hatch slid open.
Darkness greeted Azula, an eerie silence filling the tattered habitation unit. Only the flickering lights in the cramped hallway behind her lit her path, stumbling across a floor strewn with discarded food rations, broken parts, and outdated data slates.
Fanwright 