Chapter 1: When the call came down the line
As rumor had it, Ozai's hellspawn was indeed a flaming dick.
Amazing, the things that Sokka's hyper-intelligent mutant brain spat out sometimes. True, nonetheless.
Because after all, the Fire Prince had crash-landed his ship in a smoking skid of radioactive garbage that went right through the village's two-meter-thick shield dome. Said dome hadn't been meant to halt physical objects so much as to absorb ambient radiation, so Sokka could almost forgive the demon-child that one, but then the guy had emerged from the semi-wreckage with radiation thrumming through his veins and proceeded to wreck shop.
Sokka's shop, in particular, and that shop was Sokka's baby and he wasn't going to let some so-called fire mutant with physical — and who knows — probably mental mods up the wazoo get away with that shit.
Thumbing a button, Sokka targeted and launched a heat-seeking titanium spear and then dashed in to close the distance with his shock glove. The prince raised a leg, smashed the spear into shards with a kick, and then attempted to do the same to Sokka without even bringing the limb down to rest.
Owww. Yup, definitely some strength and speed mods there, no way was that ferocity natural. Without conservation of momentum on his side, Sokka might be in the same pathetically twitching pile as the spear remnants right now. Sokka rolled to his feet, for once wishing that his own genetic irregularities had more physical advantages, and blinked back the double-vision.
Close up, his mind had locked on a few key features of the Fire Prince's appearance for quick analysis. Typical clothing for Fire Lord Ozai's elite super-soldiers, consisting of black and blood-red kevlar-synth blend highlighted in gold, obscured any of the more obvious physical mods that had been made to the elegantly muscled frame. What was really worrying, though, was the Tracker's eye. Or rather, where the trademark red-tinged synthetic organ should have been.
Instead, an angry red swath of scorched flesh covered most of the left side of the man's face — perhaps an extraction gone wrong, but it was fairly easy to sub out the optic nerve these days so it was more likely an installation gone wrong. Which didn't add up, because the gold iris behind the scorched slit was clouded, but there was no way it should be bio. If the guy's body had rejected the vision mod, there'd be no reason to stick his natural eyeball back in for vanity purposes, and if the burn was just an injury — an old one, too, by the looks of it — why would he choose to keep the dead organ?
Sokka would have to critique his opponent's questionable accessorizing choices after he finished getting that pile of walking plutonium out of the lab and then out of his village entirely. And anyway he wasn't about to look a gift horse in its blind eye.
He'd already accounted for his enemy's restricted field of vision, easy as breathing, and Sokka had just the weapon for that. If only he could reach it…
Sokka dove under the nearby workstation's chemical hood, glad that he'd procrastinated on re-stocking the extra-strong acids, then rolled out the other side. Away from his objective, currently, but a distraction was in order, and boy did the Fire Prince deliver. His fist smashed through the table in a shower of glassware, and acids and bases combined with a hiss, sending obscuring clouds of mostly-harmless gasses into the air. The next instant, a lithe body twisted through the wreckage with the agility of an Olympic gymnast.
Hell, those were some crazy good mods. Sokka would be jealous except that his people didn't make a habit of mutilating children. Generations of living in an irradiated environment had done that just fine without the need for any external help.
Besides, Sokka thought as his fingers closed around the boomerang, who needed physical enhancements when they were smart enough to maximize use of the tools at hand? Such as this bad boy.
Angles and velocities calculated, Sokka let the curved piece of sharpened metal fly.
"You missed," came the prince's smoke-and-brimstone voice, mouth curling in the beginnings of a smirk. Well look at you, thought Sokka, all grown up and trying to engage in conversation like an actual human being. Too bad I'm about to bash your CPU out.
"Did I, now," is what he chirped aloud, before Mr. Boomerang hit home.
On a normal person it would have been a kill shot. Sokka was immediately reminded that whatever it was he was fighting did not qualify as either normal or people.
The cross-eyed expression of concussed rage and humiliation was still just as funny on a cyborg face as it would have been on a fully human one. Sokka would be laughing, except that his usual buffer of fifteen steps ahead had now shrunk to five, and they were all rapid backpedals in the direction of his next potential weapon as the enraged mutant descended on him.
"Human," growled the demon-spawn, reeling in Sokka by the collar to stare him down with uncanny golden eyes.
This was all mildly terrifying, but Sokka was determined not to let the emotion take control. "What of it?" he retorted instead. Normally Sokka was as proud of his ninetieth percentile Zei Humanity Factor as he was of his ninety-ninth percentile IQ, but he hardly saw how it was relevant right now, especially given that his opponent was so obviously on the opposite end of the scale.
"Avatar. Where are they."
Well if it wasn't the flaming bastard's lucky day. Not many people would even recognize that English loanword that frequented pre-Apoc Cache-speak, much less be able to rattle off a definition. Maybe that explained why Sokka's lab of all places was under attack from the elusive Tracker.
Still, Sokka was going to need more than two words and some gender-neutral pronouns to go on. Context was everything, and all that.
"Use your words," Sokka complained, stalling for time. He had no interest in helping the Fire Prince out even if he did know exactly what he was talking about, but backup should be coming soon, if his calculations of his sister's arrival time from her last known whereabouts were correct.
Right on schedule, Katara broke down the door, which was admittedly easy for her when she could just use her mutation to manipulate the ice around it into parting for her. And while Sokka would like the record to reflect that his little sister was an incurable show-off, he was really grateful for her flashy ice powers sometimes.
The Tracker's grip didn't slacken at all with Katara's entrance, but Sokka deemed the timing good enough to go for the tried-and-tested knee to the groin. Mod-enhanced reflexes enabled the Fire Prince to twist aside, dodging both that and Katara's icicle barrage, before he threw Sokka away to focus on the sibling with the water-manipulation mutation. Rude.
Katara didn't have a lot of combat moves but the ones she had served her well. Sokka knew she'd be liquefying a portion of the building next to wash the intruder out the door, and dashed to one of the electronics tables to prepare a zappy surprise for when that happened. Physics said that cyborgs and water don't mix, and Sokka was always one to bet on the laws of nature.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sokka could see Katara's wave was ready to release; he grabbed for a handful of old lithium batteries that he'd been about to recycle and prepared to throw.
The Tracker got there first, hurling a stream of flame from his hands with an inhuman scream.
Steam erupted, filling the room and making it a perfect time for a sneak attack, but Sokka's brain was occupied for the moment, because what the hell?
Sure, hearsay said that Ozai's line had a fire mutation but Sokka had dismissed that out-of-hand because mutations didn't work like that. And he'd thought their grandiose titles like Fire Lord and Fire Prince were because their domain encompassed the remaining half of the Ring of Fire, known as the Fire Nations, not because they had… well, any actual fire powers. Much less ones that lit up their veins with a hellish golden glow, to a distinctly unearthly effect.
If it weren't for Sokka's aversion to bioscience and the fact that he was focusing on survival right now, he'd have the guy laid out on a lab table in two seconds flat. Cyborgs traditionally mixed as poorly with fire as they did with water, and Sokka had never heard of a flame mod; for a fleeting second, he wondered if demons were indeed real and one had ascended from the pit.
The amount of fire and ice being flung around with impunity certainly resembled a lab-scale apocalypse, and its Nation-ending potential was not lost on Sokka. He knew Katara knew better than to allow the fight to get anywhere near the cryo-preservation units that held the Badu people's viable seed and egg samples, but they hadn't exactly designed the lab with defense against an invasion in mind. Sokka's own survival was, however, currently in much higher jeopardy than his sister's future progeny; he felt justified for prioritizing that over some long-shot worst-case scenario.
Sokka ducked under a rapidly melting icefall and finally reached his magnum opus. As his fingers closed around the leather-wrapped handle, a space-black blade extended. The lonsdaleite edge could cut through metal and bone as easily as air, its vibration-damping structure rigid with cutting crystals the width of mere microns. Sokka felt it settle into his grasp in that same satisfying way that his spine re-aligned itself after a good stretch at the end of a long day of work… just as the worst-case scenario played out inexorably in front of his eyes.
Katara had finally gotten a perfect angle for a headshot and now her icicles were screaming down from above. The Tracker dropped to the floor, but not as an icy pincushion; he was just enough in advance of Katara's missiles to sweep his feet a full three-sixty in what looked like a crazy dance move. Flames roared high, melting the frozen projectiles and okay, the guy could shoot fire from his feet too now, overpowered much?
The unfairness of it all turned out to be the least of Sokka's worries. Because like an idiot, Sokka had forgotten about the damned coolant tubes running happily just under the ceiling, connecting the cryo-preservation units to the lab's powerful cooling unit.
Tubes filled with highly flammable coolant.
The irony was just crushing today.
So was the pressure wave following the explosion of the sum total of his gene pool's viable reproductive material and, for good measure, the freezer that contained it.
Sokka had been far enough away to escape the flying shrapnel, but he was just as unable to move as if he were pinned in place by sharp metal shards. The fight faded into the background, although there was no drop in its intensity, and Sokka knew the signs, but that didn't help him in the least. He could feel the pounding of his own heart start to fill his ears, and this was bad it was bad it was the worst.
Sokka blinked eyes weighed down by leaden lids, and felt a twitch of fingers that had suddenly become clumsy and slow. He registered a brief flash of flames diverted by an icy barrier, heard Katara's enraged shout, and hoped that the momentary clarity could beat back the fog. Action was what he needed right now, not thought, but he barely had a grasp on either. Sokka tried to focus on his sister, fighting on as if their own people's little world hadn't just ended, and there wasn't even a point to it anymore, was there? Logically they should both just stop. On the bright side, at least Sokka's frontal lobe wasn't fully out of commission yet. Too bad he had the most stubborn sister in the world who'd come up against an opponent who looked like he would only quit when hell froze over.
It might have been seconds or minutes that had passed since the explosion; Sokka would never be able to tell, but then Katara was always slower on the uptake than he was. To tell the truth, though, so were most other people. Still, they were siblings, so when the full horror struck, Katara froze, too.
The difference was that when Katara froze, so did everything about her, thick ice forming from seemingly thin air. Twin screams tore the air apart; the cyborg, summoning an inferno from God-knew-where in an effort to escape the deep freeze, and Katara, as the anguish and disbelief washed over, through, and out of her.
An eerie silence fell, punctuated only by the odd remnants of flames guttering out. A small pane of ice cracked; Katara drew in a ragged breath.
Sokka wasn't breathing. Or if he was, he suddenly couldn't hear himself, because sounds were far away again, and his thoughts were sluggish, so far from their usual rapid-fire sparks.
When he could parse the signals coming from his body again, he realized he was shaking.
"Katara," he said, but his mouth didn't move so he tried again. "Katara."
She must have heard, because she turned away from the still-life scenery she'd created and he could see her mouth forming the words oh, no.
Sokka didn't know if it was because she recognized the state he was in or because the realization that it was all gone had finally sunk in and she'd moved on to what do we do now, and found a wall as impenetrable as the one Sokka's mind had come up against.
It was over and the door was open on a dizzying divergence of possibilities. None of this should have ever even happened to his little Oceanarctic backwater that was doing its best to be forgotten by the rest of the world, and Sokka found the simplest of tasks slip away from him as his brain erected barriers in a last-ditch defense against the flood.
The last thing Sokka rightly remembered saying was, "I'm about to do something two fishhooks stupid, aren't I."
A/N:
Very excited to finally introduce this work to you all! The rest of part one, chapters 2-8, will come out all in the same week once I'm done editing them, so probably mid-to-late April. I've decided to post this story one arc at a time, since I know I've stopped reading many fics once I no longer remember what happened in the last update.
I'd love to know what you think of this! Feel free to ask me anything on Tumblr, although if it's something that will be answered later in the story you'll probably just get a cryptic answer. Also I'll eventually post there a badly-done sketch of Sokka and his (read: Asami's) shock glove from this chapter… once I'm allowed back in my office where I took it to scan and then forgot to do so…
Oh, and it was a deliberate choice not to use the name [Water] Tribe for Sokka and Katara's people, as there are more culturally appropriate terms. Full disclaimer regarding my efforts to fairly portray indigenous and minority peoples to come with the next chapters.