There’s A New Recruit At The Shatterdome (and Zuko’s Not Too Happy About It)

Shapeshifters Water Tribe People au! Headcanons! Please if there’s any, give us.

Okay. 🤗 Long, very long, post ahead!

So this AU is not about wolves only. I picked the word ‘Shapeshifter’ deliberately. There are more than one animal-shifting here.

(Mostly because I was looking at pictures of wolves and seals and couldn’t pick one. Both are beautiful animals, and the babies are fucking adorable.)

Water benders shift into sea-hunter animals, mostly seals, sometimes penguins. They’re born in their animal form and shifting comes much more naturally to them. Though they do have a weakness in forms of their pelts. Katara is a selkie in this instance.

(And Aang is that polite unassuming boy who returns her pelt to her whenever Katara loses it, never once thinking of keeping it and trapping her. It’s endearing but gets annoying when Katara’s trying to court Aang and giving him her pelt, willingly and repeatedly. And he just keeps returning it!)

On the other hand, non-benders shift into land animals. Wolves and does, mostly. Huge ones. Often times the carnivore shifters get assigned the role of warriors, while the herbivore shifters are the ones who stay home.

(Not always though. Hakoda is a wolf, yes, but Bato is a deer and he can gore a man with his antlers.)

A non-bender’s shifting abilities lay in their hair. In this AU, Sokka’s wolf-tail is literally a wolf tail and magical. You cut it off, and he can’t shift, not until he grows it back.

(Oh, and Yue was a fox! A rare and treasured breed. An activity that Sokka and Yue did was chase each other around in their animal forms.)

All this shifting business is a strictly kept secret! No outsider is to know. Even more so when the world is at war.

-

So onto the Zukka side of things.

Zuko, newly banished and feeling suffocated by everything, especially his uncle’s hovering, thinks to take a quick trek through snow to get away from it all.

He gets lost when a snow storm comes out of nowhere. To survive it, he follows a wolf back to its shelter, readying himself to fight if need be.

What followed was hours of Zuko and the wolf slowly and cautiously working around each other, before the wolf dug out some warm clothes out of nowhere and threw it at the shivering prince.

They got on pretty well afterwards, Zuko realizing that this was no ordinary animal.

He opens up to the wolf, calling it Silver and telling him of the things his family put him through. Not once mentioning that he was a prince.

Why would he? The wolf doesn’t need to know that.

-

Hours after, Iroh, desperately searching and worried out of his mind, finds the ice cave. The man sees a grey wolf run out of it, and his heart drops to his stomach. But then his nephew, safe and sound, comes out right after.

The uncle and nephew watch the wolf as it runs away, stopping to look back a few times, before completely disappearing.

Iroh theorizes that it was a spirit, come to aid a lost child, and Zuko agrees in secret. The wolf was special.

-

Few years after, when they attack the Southern Village, Zuko sees a boy with his face painted and marked the same way his wolf’s was.

When he threatens the villagers for the Avatar, he chants apologizes in his head to the spirit of the South Pole.

Never once realizing that his wolf was already watching him, betrayed and far from ready to forgive him.

Leo Arc part 7

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Leo confronts the reality he’s been hiding from for too long.

CHANTING IT'S OWN NAAAME

Only villains like punch chowder.

Reference photos ofc

If you’re curious and haven’t seen it, its Red flags by Tom Cardy, and the Artist is Gabriella Antali! Check out their work :3

The other is Invincible lol

These bad boys can fit so much trauma in them

(After this accident sokka has the idea to build good memories together to follow during the drift. Which then becomes an excuse to go on a bunch of Not-Dates with zuko, fall in love and pine horribly)

Zukka pacrim au part 3 / part 2 / part 1

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