I decided to try out the Avatar fandom. This is a responce to Kitty Elkabush's challenge- if you're a fan of Zutara, check out her stuff! Please enjoy reading. : )
Disclaimer: I do not own Avatar, nor any of its characters.
Zuko faced his death with no hope of rescue.
A better way to say it would be that Zuko was facing his death, and he desperately hoped that nobody would show up in time to rescue him. Because rescue implied people. People seeing—and hence laughing hysterically at—the predicament that he'd gotten himself into.
Firebenders don't die in the normal way. They go up in huge gouts of flame, or rivers of inescapable lava, or roaring infernos.
They don't, Zuko informed himself, Get eaten by bears. It wasn't even a very big bear. It was a little wimpy bear. But it was still going to eat him. Easily. Why? Because he was stuck. How?
To an icicle. By his tongue.
Sure, Uncle Iroh. "Try licking an icicle!" He says. "No person should live their life without licking an icicle at least once," He tells me. Zuko snarled internally, kicking at the approaching bear with one leg. If I live through this, he swore, I'm going to KILL HIM.
Of course, after realizing that his tongue was stuck, he'd tried to free it. With his fingers.
Which were now also stuck.
So he was completely immobile. With a bear getting ready to eat him. Unable to firebend because he was in an ice cavern, and the slightest temperature change would bring it down around his ears. So I've got two choices, he thought. Death by thousands of tons of ice, or death by getting my legs getting chewed off by a goddam bear that I can't fight because my tongue's stuck to an icicle. The bear made a tentative swipe at his leg and he kicked viciously at it again, letting loose a growl muted by the chunk of ice sticking to his face.
The bear was undeterred, though. Having finally decided that Zuko was truly helpless, it opened its maw, teeth shining with ropes of saliva as it prepared to tear the first chunk out of Zuko's side. The prince winced away, closing his eyes and preparing for the pain—
And then he realized that bears don't giggle. And someone was definitely giggling.
The prince cracked his eyes open, blinking at the site of an ice-encased bear with its teeth inches from his thigh and the corner of a blue skirt whisking around the corner.
"Aang! Sokka, you've got to see this! Hahaha!"
Zuko closed his eyes and wished for a bigger bear.