BUTTERFLIES! ━ prince zuko

𝖎𝖎𝖎. Curiosity Kills The Cat

𝖈𝖚𝖗𝖎𝖔𝖘𝖎𝖙𝖞 𝖐𝖎𝖑𝖑𝖘 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖈𝖆𝖙
curiosity kills the cat
volume ii, chapter iii

❄️🦋💦

AKIARA LIKES TO THINK SHE'S A POSITIVE PERSON. A moonbeam with a smile. It's kinda in her DNA, seeing as her sister is literally the Moon Spirit and her father is sorta like, the greatest Northern Water Tribe Chief ever. She's always made a conscious effort to see the glass half full, to choose happiness, blah, blah, blah. You already know that. Obviously. Or, at least, you should.  But uh, right now, Akiara's really struggling with her whole positivity schtick because um, they're in a fucking swamp.

      And swamps are gross.

     (No offense.)

     It all started because Aang like, felt the earth calling to him or something. Akiara didn't hear it, but she's not an earth bender, so she'll let it slide. It must be an Avatar thing, anyway. And then they started descending upon the swamp, until Sokka was all like hang up and Aang was all like OK. But then there was a tornado, which forced them to make an emergency landing in the swamp anyway.

     By emergency landing, she means crash. They crashed into the swamp.

Now she's wading through icky, muddy swamp water, absolutely soaked in it. Slimy mud is dripping down her forehead and towards the corners of her mouth and ew, she can taste the warm and salty and dirty water, ew, ew, ew!

     When Aang falls down from the sky, he bends the air around him so that he stays floating above the icky water and Akiara pouts and childishly thinks that's not fair.

     "Where's Appa and Momo?" Aang asks.

     "Um, and Kiko?" Akiara adds as she glances around at the gloomy swamp because hello, where is her friend? Nowhere to be seen, apparently.

Aang seems to take that as a cue to air-bend himself through the trees and out of sight. Probably to look for their missing friends. Hopefully to look for their missing friends.

That leaves Akiara and Katara and Sokka to wade through the icky water. Which, by the way, is so much worse than the sewer water from Omashu. At least there she had the opportunity to escape it. But it's not like she can bend an entire swamp out of her way. She's not that powerful.

Look on the bright side, Akiara! At least you guys aren't dead!

     "Sokka, you've got an elbow leech," Katara announces.

"WHERE? WHERE?" Sokka's in full freak out mode, flailing around desperately, splashing around frantically.

"Where do you think?" Katara asks dryly.

Sokka angrily rips the elbow leech off from his arm, throwing it into the water. "Why do things keep attaching to me?" He smacks into a tree branch and he scowls. "This place sucks!"

"Not all of it," says Akiara brightly. "Look at that pretty flower!"

Like a molten jewel hidden away in the darkness, a dazzling starflower blooms in the gloom and doom of the swamp. Fabricated from soft petals of a violent violet, crooked and gnarled tree roots cradle it as shielding it from the world corrupted by shadows. It's kinda poetic, Akiara thinks.