Katara: A Mulan Story
Author: Sonja Schreiber
Pairings: Katara/Zuko, others...I don't want to spoil anything ;)
Summary: Katara, a young woman, takes her father's place in battle, disguising herself as a man. Based on the "Ballad of Mulan" and Jingle Ma's 2009 "Mulan".
Note: This is 100% AU. This will not be a fluff piece. This is NOT based on Disney's Mulan. Be warned, there will be much gender bending. I love all the strong women in A:TLA and LOK, however, for the sake of the plot of this story, unless I cut them out or made the off screen characters, I had to make them men. I hope you understand.
Disclaimer: I did not create the characters in "Avatar: The Last Airbender" or "Legend of Korra", nor did I develop the underlying plot of this story of "Mulan". Those credits got to Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko, and Jingle Ma.
Chapter 1 - Intro
Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the nations began to intermarry and the borders between the four nations began to blur. As time passed, the world divided into many new countries, each with citizens and benders from all the former nations. Two of these new countries were Heping* and Xiongdi†
In the 20th year under their wise Emperor Roku, Heping was thriving, abounding in farms and craftsmen. Their neighbors to the north, Xiongdi, were not faring as well. Though they were rich in metals to craft weapons and tools, the harsh weather and barren, rocky terrain made food a scarce commodity. However, instead of bartering and trading the resources they did have, the leader of the largest tribe in Xiongdi, Lord Iroh, united the nation's tribes and sent these armies to pillage and plunder Heping every spring to prepare for the harsh winter.
Iroh had two children. The youngest was a daughter named Asami. She was kind and wise as she was beautiful, with fair skin, raven hair, and vibrant green eyes. His eldest, a firebender named Ozai, was tall and handsome, but ruthless and cruel.
Ozai, captain of his father's army, enjoyed a practice he called releasing his prisoners of war. The prisoners would be gathered into a large shallow pit, surrounded by Xiongdi benders and archers, and murdered like defenseless animals. His father disliked this practice, along with Ozai's eagerness to prolong the yearly pillages into a full on war. To Iroh, pillaging was an act of providing for his people, and to an extent, there was still honor in his warring. To Ozai, it was an act of power. Iroh wanted his people to live. Ozai wanted the world.
Under Ozai, Iroh's armies grew larger and stronger, and it soon became evident that Heping's army, as advanced and experienced as it was, could not defeat Xiongdi's sheer numbers.
*Hépíng: Chinese for "peace"
† Xiōngdì: Chinese for "brotherhood"