Author's Notes:

I do not own Avatar: The Last Airbender.

This is an alternate-history, gender-bent ATLA world, set ten years after Sozin's Comet arrives. In this story, the Avatar failed to defeat the Fire Lord, but the Avatar is not dead and the world is not entirely without hope.

This story was requested by the very kind ObeliskX, who has patiently waited for it for months. I find the concept of gender-bending ATLA really challenging as a writer, and these characters have only recently come alive for me. So before you get too far, you should know that this story is not a re-telling of ATLA with a gender swap. If you're looking for something like Katara, but with male body parts, and Zuko, but with female body parts, you're probably not going to be happy with this. I'm going for something more like: what characters would emerge in a gender-swapped world and how would that change the story? So they're sort of new characters, with the spirit of the old and facing similar struggles to what the old characters were facing.

Since the character names in a gender-bender can be hard to follow, here is a reference guide:

Character Guide

Aana = female Aang, age 22

Water Tribe: Toraka = male Katara, age 26; Koska = female Sokka, age 24; Chief Hakana = male gran gran; Akoda = female Hakoda

Fire Nation: Azuki = female Zuko, age 24; Zulon = male Azula, age 26; Fire Lord Ozalia = female Ozai; Aunt Iris = female Iroh

Toph = ambiguously gendered Toph, age 22 (I don't think Toph should be defined by gender.)

I hope you enjoy the experiment!

Chapter 1

110 A.F.N. (110 years in the Age of the Fire Nation)

It was the light that had drawn Princess Azuki to the Southern Water Tribe. Years later, she would look back on that singularity and wonder what universal force orchestrated it and what it had meant.

Today Azuki could see only as far as the curtains blocking her mother, Fire Lord Ozalia, from her sight.

"Your face could get stuck like that, you know."

Azuki shivered and stood up straight as her older brother, Zulon, leaned slightly in her direction to taunt. They were facing the curtains together, waiting for their audience with their mother. They had been summoned.

"It will not," Azuki said.

Zulon raised one eyebrow in a perfectly sinister arch. "Why sister, are we really going to play a child's game?" He lowered his voice. "Would it comfort you if said 'it will so'?" He laughed. Zulon's laughter always made Azuki's skin crawl.

She lowered her head. At twenty-four, she was far from childhood. Fire glowed behind her mother's curtain and someone yelled in anguish. Azuki shuddered again. No. She was not a child. She doubted if anyone in the Fire Nation had retained that innocence.

Her mother's guards dragged a man dressed in rags from behind the curtain. He clutched a blackened shoulder — the smell of burnt flesh always turned Azuki's stomach - and he was followed by a woman, sobbing without tears or sound. The woman met Azuki's eyes and Azuki wondered if she was the man's wife or sister or mother or daughter. The depth-less sorrow in the woman's face and her dirty, leathery skin made it impossible for Azuki to know her age. She had the sudden instinct to reach out to the woman. She clenched her hands at her sides instead.

"Prince Zulon and Princess Azuki," another guard called loudly. Azuki startled and looked up. The guard had no emotion in her eyes that Azuki could see. "The Fire Lord will see you now, your highnesses."

Zulon strode forward confidently. Azuki followed at his heels, resisting the urge to drop her head in shame. The last time their mother had granted them an audience, it had been to command them to burn down another village in the resisting Earth lands. Azuki wondered what nightmare was about to befall her this time.

She tripped accidentally over a ripple in the carpet leading to her mother and she thought she heard a guard snicker softly as she clumsily righted herself, thankfully avoiding a full dive into the ground. Azuki ignored the guard's snicker. She wasn't sure when it had happened, but sometime over the last ten years she had stopped seeing herself as worthy of her nation's respect. Her honor was gone. She deserved far more than snickering.

Toraka of the Southern Water Tribe stood alone on the upper decks of his grandfather's ship. They were in the warm waters to the west of the Fire Nation's shores, and Toraka kept a steady eye on the seas. Toraka was, as far as anyone knew, the only non-captive waterbender left in the world. There were rumors that Fire Lord Ozalia had him marked personally for capture and a slow, painful death.

She would never capture him alive.

He watched the seas. They were still, but his heart was not.

"Toraka!"

Koska ran up from behind him. Toraka smiled at his little sister, then smiled grimly at himself for continuing to think of her as "little" anything. Koska was slender but muscular and the years Koska had spent training with the Kyoshi Warriors after the fall of the Earth Kingdom and before the Kyoshi Warriors had finally been forced to abandon their island to the Fire Nation had turned his sister fierce.

"What is it, Koska?"

"Fire Nation ships spotted far to the north!" Koska pointed. "We're going to need to go under."

"Got it," Toraka said. He focused his energy on the motion of the water and began pulling it up around them, raising a mist above the ship as he did so. The water swooped up to the sides of the ship and swirled around them, waves cresting up at Toraka's command. Then, in a sweep of power, he pushed the ship into the sea, sinking it in a bubble of air and forcing it down until a ship could pass above them at the surface without any knowledge of the Water Tribe vessel below it.

He breathed out a calming breath as Koska sucked in a worried breath next to him. He glanced sideways at her.

"Sea dragon," Koska whispered, pointing up toward the top of the bubble, where an enormous sea dragon swam above them.

"Sea dragon," Toraka echoed, and he did not not mention his memory of Aana riding the Unagi at Kyoshi Island, back when they had all still been together. He knew from the glassy sheen in Koska's eyes that he was not alone in reliving the moment anyway.

Koska seemed to steel herself after the sea dragon had passed. "Grandfather wants us to meet him below deck to go over plans for a new mission."

Toraka nodded. "Now?"

"Now," Koska confirmed.

Toraka sighed and watched Koska slip away to the stairs that led below deck, where their grandfather would be waiting. It still seemed strange after all this time to be reunited with his grandfather, who had left the Southern Water Tribe with the other warriors two years before Toraka and Koska had met the Avatar. At the time, the Fire Nation had been nearing victory in the war. Now, the Fire Nation's victory was final. Fire Lord Ozalia (the United Water Tribes refused to acknowledge her as the Phoenix Queen) ruled over all the land. Where the Northern Water Tribe had once stood, a Fire Nation outpost thrived. The impoverished village Toraka and Koska had grown up in was completely abandoned, as was the entirety of the South Pole.

There was no more Earth Kingdom. There were still Earth lands, but Fire Lord Ozalia had made use of the second coming of Sozin's comet by burning through the Earth Kingdom and destroying the King's rule. The people of the Earth Kingdom had been strong, and Toraka knew there were still earthbenders in hiding and rebel clans moving through the charred remains of the Earth Kingdom's once glorious lands. But Earth King himself was now no more than a puppet for Fire Lord Ozalia.

Then there was Aana.

Aana, the Avatar and the last surviving Air Nomad, was locked away deep within the Fire Lord's palace.

But Toraka couldn't think about Aana locked away for so long without his temper flaring up, and that would mean rough seas.

Because Fire Lord Ozalia may have controlled all the land, but the United Water Tribe controlled the seas.

Toraka silently thanked the Spirit of the Ocean again, for strengthening the Water Tribe, and strengthening him, when they had most needed it. To the great dismay of Fire Lord Ozalia, the ocean tides refused to bow to the Fire Nation. Instead, they heeded to Toraka's own will. Toraka thought it was partly because he was the only waterbender left and partly because the Spirit of the Ocean shared Toraka's fury with the Fire Nation.

(Fire Lord Ozalia should have thought twice before allowing one of her generals to destroy the Moon Spirit. She apparently didn't know of the deep connection between the Ocean and the Moon, or how angry and unpredictable the Ocean could become now that the Moon Spirit was gone.)

With the Ocean Spirit's help, Toraka sank Fire Nation vessels and destroyed barricades. He sent tidal waves over the shores of the Fire Nation and terrorized ships with hurricanes.

The Water Tribe ruled the seas, and everything in the seas, and that is why the Water Counsel — a group of the former Southern and Northern Water Tribe's greatest chiefs and masters — continued to thrive, along with hundreds of Water Tribe refugees, on an island so far in the middle of the ocean that the Fire Nation would never find them.

And if they ever did…

Torako clenched his jaw. He had a war meeting to attend. First though, someone had to deal with the Fire Nation ship passing above.

He focused his energy on the ship that had been unlucky enough to cross his path, and in one great blow, he sent up a wave that capsized the ship. The noise was loud above them, and Toraka flinched at the thought for the many lives he had just ended. The Ocean Spirit was vindictive though, and it seemed to Toraka that the spirit's laughter was echoing through the water.

Toraka walked calmly to the stairs.