PEEEEEASE!!! Some Song and zuko shenanigans!!! I just love how you write them <3<3<3
The ostrich-horse comes back weeks after she was stolen. She raises one big foot and scratches at her harness, which clearly hasn’t been tightened properly, because the saddle finishes slipping sideways and dumps the thief himself into the dirt outside her stable. Song is just coming off from a shift at the clinic, so her first thought isn’t That bastard, it’s Dehydration, probable sunstroke, has he had a single meal since he left us, that bastard.
His eyes are closed. His breathing is shallow. She nudges him with a foot, then pats him down. Two swords and a knife get hidden in the shed at the bottom of a grain bin. She draws up two buckets of cool water from the well. One of them goes in the ostrich-horse’s trough. The good girl coos, and drinks greedily. The other one goes over the thief’s head.
He sits up, sputtering.
“Hello, Junior,” she says, and drops the bucket on him, too.
“What? Where? …Song?”
He doesn’t have the grace to look sheepish. But she’ll take the flash of fear in his eyes, the way his shoulders twitch under the lacking weight of his swords, the way his hands convulse around the bucket. It feels good. Probably not in a way she should like, but it’s not like she’s planning to do whatever it is he’s afraid of.
(He was afraid the last time he was here, too. But not of her.)
“The well’s in back,” she says. “Get a drink. Don’t make yourself puke. And don’t steal my bucket.”
She’s moved on to brushing the ostrich-horse’s feathers when he comes back. The ostrich-horse has moved on to pecking grain. Li is holding the bucket, and wobbling a little. His skin is still sun-flushed.
“Sit down,” she orders, pointing to the porch, with its shady overhang.
“What…?”
“Sit.”
She finishes rubbing down the ostrich-horse’s feathers. Checks her feet for scuffs and stones, and her legs for strains. Then she walks past a sitting, wide-eyed Li, goes into the house, and comes back with a basket of carrot-potatoes and a scrub brush.
“Clean these,” she orders. “You know where the water is.”
And he’s already got a bucket to do the washing in. He’s been clutching it since she handed it to him. She’s getting a little sick, of that cornered pygmy puma look of his.
“You got a meal and an ostrich-horse rental from us, last time,” she says. “This time, it’s payment up front. With interest.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Work for it,” Song says.
Li has no idea how to clean a tuber. He’s very diligently overdoing it when her mother comes home.
“Hmm,” she says quietly, stopping next to Song. “Do I need to get someone?”
Li’s shoulders stiffen, because he’s got better hearing than either of them thought, and because he has to know that ostrich-horse theft isn’t treated lightly. Their town isn’t big enough to warrant guardsmen, but a few neighbors and a rope would get things done.
“He’s starving,” Song says, after moving this conversation farther away.
“Hmm,” says her mother.
“Our ostrich-horse isn’t.”
They both stare across the yard. At a refugee with golden eyes, who doesn’t know how to even start preparing his own meal. But whatever money he had, however he’d gotten it, he’d let their bird—his bird—eat first.
They don’t let him sleep in the stable, for obvious reasons. He doesn’t run off in the night, for less obvious ones.
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As someone who LOVES a good old time travel au, and after seeing amazing fanart of kid!Mihawk i have to let it out!!
I just wanna read a time travel fic where baby Mihawk wakes up and finds himself in the world of adult Mihawk and he's like wtf is going on?
And word goes around that a kid that looks exactly like Hawkeyes and carries the same cross knife as him is roaming around this island and rumors say it's the son he abandoned to fend for himself.
And so, marines and every pirates he ever wronged come after him for revenge and the little guy is just thinking why is everyone trying to get me? While doing his best with his cross dagger to rid of them.
And Shanks, good ol' shanks could have sworn that if his old rival had an 9years old, he would know about it (also he refuses to let the bitter taste in his heart take over unless his own eyes see) so he's skeptical about the whole thing and that's the only thing that gets him to leave his hideout in a reclused ghost island waiting for whatever is his big plan to take place.
News say Red Shanks is on the move after being mia for a few years and everyone got their panties in a twist, what could have raised the emperor from the dead.
He follows from island to island because apparently the young boy knows how to avoid the marines and pirates coming after him.
Till one night, on their stop at some bar on an island that wasn't really on the plan, he sees the boy. Just outside the bar in an alley, where he went to empty his guts from the booze overfilling his body, there stood bloody faced, cross dagger in one hand, a tiny version of his old rival with a bounty hunter's body at his feet.
The boy furrows his eyebrows even more at the new arrival and strikes another pose in case the new guy tries something funny. But Shanks, drunk ass Shanks, who knows his rival by heart is a 100% sure the little guy is in fact his rival for whatever magical reason, there he stands in front of him in the form of an 9years old and Shanks giggles at that -to which the child takes great offense- and just say "hey kid, i'm a friend of your dad's, want me to take you to him?"
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