Title: Something Strange
Summary: …Come with us and you will see, this, our town of Halloween. Trick or Treat?
Warning: AU in the context of Nightmare Before Christmas. Thus, the characters are older than shown in ATLA, but younger than they appear in LOK. Mention of the macabre in an almost black comic sense.
Dedication: To Kirra kills as I hope this meets the criteria for the request made in this month of Hollows Eve. It's not perfect, but it's better than the plot-bunny in my head made it out to be.

-:-
If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
-Where the Sidewalk Ends.

-:-
There were objects so peculiar they were not to be believed,
All around, things to tantalize my brain…
-The Nightmare Before Christmas.

i. Beginning of Fall-:-Burning Man-:-

There is something almost freeing about being the only person born outside of Hollow Town that existed there by something like choice and duty. There is also something terrifying about it, seeing as Aang simply existed in the town as the person alert and aware when someone of one plain of existence made for another one through the portals that took on the odd appearance to all of ancient, shifting and imposing trees with shapes and shadows cut into them more than centuries ago by ancient spirits that needed to separate the customs and spirits of the world. Chaos and Order carried their heavy burden as well…

But he wouldn't think of that as he stood at the town square with many ghouls, ghosts, goblins and macabre figures of the night as they awaited their champion to come dancing in his flames from the fields of the living and unrotting beings. This was his month to bask in the fear of the living as it was Night of Burning Men.

The night of that festival was peculiar to the Lighter Winds spirit on his first introduction to it…

(The man before him with half his face mottled from flame when he had been human—skin gleaming red hot as he stood before Aang, smelling of burnt dog meat and making Aang gag—was a devil. He was unsettling in posture and voice and the light being was not sure how to respond as the demon watched Aang shake when he asked if he could spare two pence so he could use the washing machines on the other end of the cleaning complex Aang had discovered five weeks after moving to the Hollow and having re-used his favorite robe twice.

Having no words to give without risking getting sick all over the fireblight monster, Aang handed over two pence and almost got the shock of his life and death when the demon—"My names Zuko; I'm guessing you're the new spirit that took over Gyatso's position of watching over the town? You'll hopefully get used to the place. Everyone else had to."—gave a sharp fanged smile and offered to pay for Aang's laundry when it was ready for the dryer; those particular machines actually took the money Zuko got from the offerings of really old people in the living world that left tribute to his straw men out in their apple orchards.

Three Wolf-bat flocks had set up sleeping quarters in the drying machines and chased the two men out of the cleaners for disturbing them, but Zuko had offered to pay for some drinks instead, so Aang still got a friend out of the trauma of some of the wolf-bats almost giving him rabies.)

ii. Middle of Fall-:-Fantasy Fest-:-

Vampires were dangerous above the ground that Hollow Town resided under, but in the twilight hours of the shrouded sky (there was a moon above their heads that seemed better still than the sun that shown red-apple-colored for a short nine hours in the clouds that never left) Aang never thought that again after assisting one fix his fences and paint his house.

Vampires above the ground (the town's folk tended to call it Up There, but Aang couldn't seem to acclimate to that as he was there and away and back so often that difference was scarcely noted in consciousness or knowledge) were beautiful or frightening. This is true as the legends tell. While they are home and not taking part in that god-awful celebration of masks and floats and drinking and music that was distasteful to someone of pure spirit and soft hearing, however, they often take on the appearance of misshapen virtues, forgotten vices or secrets of saints.

Sokka was handsome, really, compared to other vampires Aang had met slumming around corner stores of the town for dropped organs or rats to ravage like prowler cats on ship hulls off coast cities. True, he had an enlarged beak that would shame a gargoyle, tan scaled skin that shed debris during heat-stroke, a thick serpent's tail that knocked over vases (Aang had replaced three flower glasses before he gave up and just left his garden to blossom without cutting stems and fashioning them into a style that was meant to soothe; he no longer wished to waste money every time Sokka came over to laugh and play) when he wasn't paying attention and wings that looked too pretty to compare to a bat, but Aang saw the good soul beyond that.

("So, anyway, where was I?"

"The part with the beach."

"Right, right," the vampire grinned, knife still in the gullet of the fox-rabbit he'd caught, draining blood into a freshly kilned clay pot to set in the moonlight later before using it the next night in his lukewarm bathwater, "So, I'm standing there working my best lines on this ditzy broad from the Fire Country and right as I'm about to lick her palm to confirm whether or not it's actually worth the trouble of draining her and hiding the body—you know Katara hates helping me with that, so I'd have to probably drag it into the woods—she screams bloody murder and I yell, 'Oh, come on! I haven't even done anything this time!'"

Dead silence except for the blooding of the fox-rabbit.

Aang still looked like he was waiting and Sokka continued after a beat; his sharp talons digging further into the animal jugular at hand, "She doesn't pick up on the clue that something is probably going to happen that'd be really bad on her end. She just keeps screaming and starts hopping up and down and pointing down at the sand. I humor her and find not one, but two, newborn owl-turtles climbing up out of their sand nest to go out to sea for the first time."

"Awww," Aang cooed, face blushing from the joy such a thought brought to him. And a block down the street, Zuko, while he was eating his favorite lunch of dried worm salt and frog kabob, suddenly got a little nauseous and paused in tearing off a piece of frog arm to take a sip of oxidized strawberry lemon juice to calm a sudden on-rush of heart-burn.

Sokka continued, both he and Aang unaware of Zuko doing any such thing to counter the happiness and general good will that Aang seemed to inspire in the very nature of the atmosphere, "…So as I'm bending over to help the little guys out, the ditzy woman—with a huge rack and a practical 'fuck me' aura, by the way—screams one more time and—BAM! She stepped on both of them and they're dead before she lifts up her foot to wipe her shoe across the sand."

Sokka finished draining the fox-rabbit and tossed the carcass next to the already drained raccoon-hare and possum-squirrel in his sink.

"…So… You ate her?"

"Damn right I did.")

iii. End of Fall-:-Halloween-:-

Toph was beautiful, Aang had no doubt about that.

Many did not take what he said at face value in this, and he wouldn't blame them; but he could only speak the truth.

(To a human she caused nightmares; to ghouls and the dead she caused scorn and derision; to bugs and flowers and the ground under their feet she was cause only for celebration.

There was a skeletal structure that grooved perfectly along her back that Aang traced with delight. Shivers from her enjoyment of the touch caused the dark green and amber traced black ridges to fold in on themselves and click-click, click-click-snip like a row of dominos until Aang removed the hand to trace the bulges that were her shoulder-blades and allow freedom for his other hand to hold the side of her face while he continued in delight with deep kissing and tasting.

The bulges of the shoulders were bindings of rope and Saint Anne's lace charmed into a sort of corset to keep hidden a pair of wings that Toph hated severely, but didn't have the courage to cut off at the roots; they could be a beautiful sight to the katydids and katy-didn'ts that lounged along her body when she went out to shake the mountains and send them crashing down into canyon nothingness so she could plant more of her personal cosmos flowers that grew so tall near the end of the summer that by fall it was required that she tie them down with rope so when they rotted they didn't fall down onto her various homes or onto some of the few people she liked. She couldn't see them—her previous life had deprived her of that and she was (she admitted it) too afraid to learn such a new skill in this new life of frightening away pulse-beats that wanted to be scared in the first place—as the insects tickled the sensitive skin and dust powder that Aang said reminded him of seal-moths and penguin-flies, but the feeling and the sounds they made kept her happy.

The feelers all along her arms, legs, back and face—thin and like a spider's webbing so a person could touch but not see them—rose up in twitches and down with a flick when Aang continued his probing and then wind rose up to close the front door. She liked where this was going, but she understood his need for modesty; the last time some of Toph's bugs wandered in—say, the viper-cricket the size of the kitchen sink or vole-millipede of the same size—had caused the mood to change drastically.

Aang had screamed like a little girl at the sight of them, and Toph couldn't stop laughing. He wasn't afraid of her at all. But lost all manner of masculinity when insects stared at him when he was doing interesting things to her nipples and the metal studs piercing through her… lower areas.)

iv. Dead Ending-:-Day of the Dead-:-

There are always dead fish strewn inside the dragging softness of Katara's dark brown hair and seeing as she spent so much of her time both on land ("Zuko, if you toss another pumpkin in my lake when it's decaying and rotting out poison, one more time, I will drag you underwater like the rapists and killers I bring in from the Moors. I am not even close to being kidding,") and in the quiet confines of her freezing cold lagoon, she stopped caring to remove the bones and dead tissue a long time ago.

Aang doesn't like how sometimes there is also a human boned hand or finger in with the dead fish (her hair actually touches the ground when it's not tied up, so the bones made chirping, rattled sounds; a reminder of dark days on Earth with offerings to pagan gods that stopped paying attention to mortals long ago, despite the offerings of virgins and so much blood,) but never says anything. He just smiles wide to suppress any urge to run or become sick when he sees another dead sea creature looking out at him while knotted in curls when Katara asks him if the dress she's thinking of buying would be a waste of the barter with the store-owner (a former cabbage merchant in life, and at present just a skeleton that liked to think he dressed his ivory bones quite well) for those skinned tripe-eels she'd been saving.

"I don't know, Katara," Aang smiled, mouth muscles hurt and aching from lifting at the corners when they wished to pucker and lift upward to cover his nose from the smell of the three baby hummingbird-goldfish clicking together at the ends of brown tresses while Katara turned counter-clockwise on a bit of a pedestal that somehow brought to mind an image of Little Miss Moffat jumping up and away from the bite of a black widow spider-cootie, "That blue die and silk fabric seem kind of inexpensive for tripe-eels."

Katara sighed, arms going limp in the long sleeved gown, her crystalline skin shining like it had been coated in grey saliva before going back to the faded dark blue-tan that came with being a water witch. Her webbed ears tilted down in affirmation of disappointment, "You're right. Perhaps he'd be willing to sell it to me for red seagull-robin eggs and those siren songs I got when I drowned that duke in Earth Country?"

One of the dead fish dropped and splattered on the tiled black and ivory floor, spinning away and almost out of Aang's sight before the store owner's pet skin and bone tiger-tabby leapt out and swallowed it with a cracking sound and a swallow. The black licorice color of its tongue peeked out to lick the rest of the taste from its lips before it glared at the air spirit and sauntered back to the window to watch the bird skeletons in from the south sing on the fence of the skull-jangle shop across the street.

"…Perhaps the siren songs would be enough. Nothing goes better than that with his iron ankle-bracelets and he hasn't been able to get those in a while. Ask him and I'll back you up."