#zutara month prompts

[bythepen98]

WIP || Zutara ❤️️💙

What I've been working on 😭 I wont lie….currently regretting including the background in the first pic. Dont know what I was thinking honestly. Making things difficult for myself seems to be a common theme yet I keep doing it afaofgisghskl I know I'll feel even shttier if I give up now though so I decided to go through with it. The second pic feels like a breeze in comparison and any stress buildup I get when I think about the first drawing just fades when I look at the second drawing. But between the two, I'm still putting most of my focus on the princess mononoke au because I'm very curious how it'll look once it's done and I do love stubio ghibli based prompts. Regardless of my constant complaining, I'm proud I took in the challenge of including a background when there was literally no reason for me to do so. Come to think of it, I think this is probably the first (or second, my memory is not the best) time I put in actual effort on a bg? like, coloring included? Anyway, I'll consider this another learning experience so it's not all bad.

[demaparbat-hp]

Almost

[pineapple-frenzy]

Dumb lil thing about them meeting up

[the-badger-mole]

Incorrect Quotes: You Drive Me (LITERALLY) Crazy!

Iroh: Having heard Zuko complaining about Katara for the thousandth time. Do you love her?

Zuko: Affronted A normal human being couldn't live under the same roof as her without going nutty! She's my idea of nothing!

Iroh: I asked you a simple question! Do you love her?

Zuko: Yes! 😡 But don't hold that against me. I'm a little screwy myself.

[zukosdualdao]

i'm a worst case kid / in a plague pit town

zutara month, day 1: reluctant allies

summary: ever-slight canon-divergence in which zuko accepts katara's offer to heal iroh after feeling his too-weak, dying pulse, as his injury is bad enough zuko is unsure he will survive otherwise. not much else changes. it was never going to.

warnings: canon-typical depictions of injury, violence, and trauma responses.

other notes: title is a lyric taken from tommy lefroy's "worst case kid". starting pov is zuko's, ending pov is katara's. two pieces of dialogue are directly taken from the show.

*

The wind is whistling in this dry, abandoned, dead town, dead like—

Zuko does not shiver, and he does not cry.

He used to be able to tell himself things like that and mean it. When did that stop being true?

Uncle’s pulse is so faint, for a moment, he thinks it isn’t there at all. Even when he feels it, he knows it might as well not be. He might not have long at all.

Zuko hears the other footsteps approaching, their silence loud and almost mournful, but he bristles on instinct. They can’t see him like this, can’t see Uncle like this—how could he be so stupid as to turn his back on the enemy? 

“Get away from us!” he shouts as he looks back. They’re all staring at his uncle’s prone form, and Zuko turns back to him, too, heaving heavy breaths. He needs to do something, but he is weak, useless, outnumbered—

“Zuko, I can help,” the waterbender insists, and Zuko wants to snarl, yell, reach for his fire, and he raises his hand to do so—and frowns. 

What does she mean?

He looks back to where Uncle lies prone.

A heartbeat shouldn’t feel like that. The Dragon of The West shouldn’t go down so easily.

Uncle shouldn’t be able to seem so small and worn and fragile.

Slowly, Zuko lowers his hand and looks to her striking blue eyes. There’s no pity or malice there, he doesn’t think, she just looks… still cautious and unyielding, but sad and sincere, too.

He’s fallen for tricks like this before, though—Azula has always loved how easily she could fool him—and it feels a little like he’s standing on the edge of a steep precipice.

It would be naive to just… trust the word of an enemy. She has no reason to want to help him. He knows this.

The rest of them still watch his uncle’s maybe-dying form, but the waterbending girl stares at Zuko unflinchingly, almost as though in challenge.

Uncle groans brokenly, the noise like that of a wounded animal. 

“How?”

*

The world is dead silent.

The prince of the Fire Nation is staring at her with tears threatening to fall from his right eye, though not the left, which is twitching lightly. She’s never before noticed how he can’t seem to open it fully due to the scar tissue set against it. She’s never had much reason to take in his features as anything more than the face of their enemy. 

His gaze is still steely and untrusting. In this light, his scar looks violently red and painful. He asks after her offer with a voice that cracks, though he doesn’t seem to pay that any heed. His hair is short but growing in, and he’s traded out his Fire Nation attire for earthly green and brown robes. He looks so different from when they last saw him. 

He looks so… young.

It’s all a little bizarre.

“Be careful, Katara,” Sokka insists from behind her, though when she glances back, his focus is on Iroh, a complicated expression playing on his features. Aang is staring at him, too, eyes wide and verging on teary. She doesn’t yet know Toph very well, but Katara can tell her body is rigid, her feet tense as her toes curl into the dusty ground beneath them. Toph doesn’t know that Iroh has been their enemy. But Iroh also helped them at the North Pole, and again just now against that princess, Zuko’s sister, she supposes, with her calculating eyes and strange blue fire.

Katara nods but says nothing further. If Zuko was going to make a move against them, he could have done it when his sister vanished.

They had turned away from their futile attack against her, and he’d already been kneeling at his uncle’s side.

She approaches slowly, circling to the side opposite him. When she kneels and reaches for her waterskin, Zuko nearly growls and takes hold of the edge of Iroh’s sleeve tightly, like he might try to drag him away.

“I’m not going to hurt him,” Katara says, flush with indignation. The dirt beneath her chafes her knees even through her clothing. “I need space to heal.”

“I’m not moving, so forget it.”

Katara tilts her head and looks into his eyes as he glares back. He now looks every bit the angry, hateful prince that had tracked them around the world for months, but she can see something else filtering through his expression, too, something like fear.

She almost wants to laugh at the absurdity of it. Why should he be afraid of them?

“Fine,” she allows after a moment. “Just don’t get in the way.”

He nods tightly, and at the agreement, Katara opens her waterskin. She calls the water to her and sets it against Iroh’s the right side of his chest, his robes black and charred. Closing her eyes, she calls out to his chi and focuses her energy on it. She doesn’t know if she can do it, doesn’t know if Iroh is truly too far gone…

After a few long moments, his breathing evens, and Katara sighs. Across from her, Zuko’s features soften just a fraction, but when she meets his eyes, somehow, she knows exactly what they both are thinking, united in nothing but this.

It doesn’t change anything, Katara's thoughts insist as her friends draw closer. Zuko tenses again. It can’t.

[ap-kinda-lit]

Time Travel AU Katara finally getting to see Zuko as a baby and little kid and she m e l t s when she sees how cute, sweet, and just so innocent he was. He would feed and talk to the turtleducks then try sneak them inside, eagerly ask his mother to hold his baby sister only to have his hair and face pulled, play-pretend dramatically while practicing his swordsmanship, try to make a flower necklace for his mom but bungle it up hilariously, fix Azula’s dolls after she damaged them, write excited letters to his uncle Iroh asking him about his adventures and what the world was like, secretly stay up past his bedtime to read under his bed covers, learn about pottery and try to make a little dragon statue for his dad, etc.

It makes it even more heart wrenching when Katara sees what he lives with and is forced to go through…

[heavensenthearty]

“You are a rebel without a cause, you are driving pain to your own heart. But who's going to save you if you climb the sky, and see that Heaven is you and only you?”

— Voz Veis.

For @zutaramonth, day #1. Prompt: Agni Kai.

[ekwolfwriter-blog]

WIP Zutara Month Challenge

Hi hi! Been a hot minute... more than that. But Happy Zutara month Everyone! Hope you are all doing well.

So, since I have been busy - life and work is a living hell - but I still wanted to participate. So I am going to do WIP Ideas challenge. I will post an idea I have, thought, or even something I have for another time. And if I do not have any idea, seeing what you all have for fun. Just to keep it fresh.

To kick this list off: Reluctant Allies

So for this idea, it has been something I have been thinking about before but never sure how to use or where, or if I need to make a new AU. But the idea would be for Zuko to part early from Iroh and somehow find himself in the desert or somewhere where there is a big sand storm. It is whipping around and causing him to fly up into the air and become beaten and unconscious.

As they were traveling, the Gaang finds Zuko as they think he was some fabric that they chasing. Sokka is trying to get them to leave him, Toph is in different as Aang is more worried about getting out of the storm.

Katara meanwhile cannot let Zuko stay this way and offers to take care of him while they make camp for the night. Circumstances make them all stay the night, while Katara begins healing Zuko. After some time, Zuko wakes up in a panic, and finds he is mostly alive, but broken arm and one of his legs is broken. He a bit hostile as the group stares at him, everyone else is also more or less ready to leave him once morning comes.

But Katara begins to coax him down from his tense feeling. Even cooling his cheeks as he feels feverish from his body fighting bacterial infections.

Eventually, Zuko is forced to travel as he is no where near ready to be left on his own and travels with the group. Katara still heals and Zuko even offers advice and when he begins to get better, offers to help around to the camp.

One instance that I like, Zuko is with them at the library, on edge but oddly protective of Katara. As the building is coming down, he is protecting her, and even saves her when his arm was still healing, and he is in pain.

So yeah, WIP for sure, who knows if people are interested. But hopefully this will be a fun challenge for me. Hope you all enjoy!

[blonde-bandit]

I didn’t want to wait to post day 2’s prompt-fic…🤭 so enjoy!

Summary (because I dont know how to link properly): The first time Zuko and Katara run into one another in the palace gardens, it’s a coincidence. They both are having a difficult time dealing with the new ‘normal’. The other times, however, not so much…

[bythepen98]

Zutara || Sleepy Zuko snuggling a very indulgent Katara ❤️️💙

kofi ⭐https://tinyurl.com/2p99f6ba

[addictofreading]

Zutara Month 2024 Day 10: Secret

I somehow missed the posting of this year's ZK Month prompts until like, the very end of last month and even though I hadn't drawn a thing this year I knew I'd regret not participating. So please accept my silly comic! <3

And Happy Zutara Month 2024!!

@zutaramonth

[artkaolinite91]

Zutara Month 2024

I wanna draw Zutara hehehe... Not checking the prompts yet..

Maybe can't really participate every day but I am gonna try to draw some prompts which interested me... XD

🚫 do not repost, edit or use my arts thanks~

[azehearts]

In honor of the #Zutara Month 2024 and Star Wars Day, here's a Zutara x Reylo mashup

Day 4 Ashes prompt! Inspired by Reylo's iconic fight scene in The Last Jedi

Been super busy so I actually don't have a zk month entry and this was done so quickly lol hahaha 👉👈

[zukosdualdao]

a wound to close, the whole thing open

zutara month, day 2: journal/diary.

summary: when katara searches the attic of ember island, she comes across a journal, hidden away on an old bookshelf.

warnings: implied/referenced child abuse wrt ozai's treatment of zuko. what's referenced here is emotional abuse and i would say at show-canon levels.

other notes: title is from gracie abrams' "camden". also, this fic is very much 'picture taken moments before mild disaster', because i imagine after the end, katara still finds ozai's baby picture, thinking it's zuko, and her thought process is 'well that was sad but look at cute baby zuko!' oops!

Katara knows she’s wrong to snoop, but it’s just so hard to resist now they’re somewhere a young Zuko once lived for stolen weeks of golden summers at a time. For so long, she’d never wondered about him much at all—she’d had, after all, no reason to want to know the boy who chased them around the world in his pursuit of capturing Aang—but things are different now.

First, there had been the catacombs of Ba Sing Se, and she’d caught another glimpse of that boy, another side of him. Wearing Earth Kingdom robes two sizes too big for him, with grief and sympathy that matched hers shining in his eyes, saying strange things about destiny and curses and seeming so lost.

Katara had spent long weeks after the fact wondering whether any of it was true as she struggled to capture sleep on that stolen Fire Navy ship. 

Of course, that was far from the only anxiety on her mind. Wondering when Aang would wake up, if he would at all… Sokka’s growing plans for the invasion, and what it could mean for all of them… being with her father for the first time in years, how half of her wanted to light up at the comfort of it but the other couldn’t dare because he went away and what if it happened again?

And Zuko…

She would turn to her other side, her chin resting on a flat hand, and wonder about him. He’d seemed so sincere, but Katara had wondered often how that could be the case when just moments later, he was catapulting rage and fire in her direction. 

But then he’d come to them and begged for a chance to prove himself. 

And even before she wanted to, far before she felt ready for it, she’d started to come to know things about him. How he would get up at dawn every morning—rising with the sun, she’d thought bitterly—to practice his own firebending forms before his lessons with Aang. How he’d sometimes frown when making the first batch of tea for them around a campfire and then make a second and always seemed to light up when their meals had a little extra spice to them.

How he would sometimes squirm just a little and hesitate a beat and sometimes even bristle before smiling shyly when the others teased him, as though it took a moment to steady his footing and catch up to the fact that it was only teasing.

She had started to know him, to really know him, before she’d wanted to, before she’d forgiven him, before she decided it was safe to let the distance between them shrink.

But now they’re friends. And with the comet looming in the coming days, with things a little tense and strange between everyone since that disaster of the play, and with the vestiges of Zuko’s childhood right here, it’s hard not to be curious.

And, as she reasons to herself while setting the cooking pot of solid silver atop the bookshelf, at least she has deniability. 

The shelves are lined with old books, with gold thread traced through their spines, and old scrolls with white parchment coloring yellow, with shiny maps, and…

Katara’s brow scrunches as she catches sight of what seems to be an old journal, bound by leatherskins, poking out from behind one of the old tomes, clearly meant to be hidden away.

She reaches for it. It’s such a small, delicate thing, really, but it feels heavy in her hands.

When she flips to the first pages, she recognizes the symbols for Zuko’s name, written out in a long, intense, careful scrawl. She’s never seen his handwriting before, but it matches what she might’ve guessed it would look like, teetering between bold and delicate.

Katara flips past the first pages, which seem to mostly consist of Zuko practicing his letters, and comes across what seems to be a draft of a letter he’d written to Iroh, certain lines crossed out or words respelled after an ink-permanent error. He asks after when Iroh will return from the war—and she shudders to think that the kindly old man who'd helped them on more than one occasion had once been much different, the terrible Dragon of the West, laying siege to Ba Sing Se.

But in another line, Zuko writes to his uncle about a festival and paper dragons. Her heart swells to think he was once so young and even playful.

Atop the right corner of the page, there is a tiny, shaded-in sketch of a blooming fire lily. Katara smiles.

She flips through more pages, most of which are much the same as the first several, but then pauses. On this one, there are dark patches—the kind that she can tell came from water drying on the parchment, and it’s now wrinkled. Once, she might have been able to salvage the page with her bending, but the water has long-since dried up and left only deterioration in its wake.

It’s…

The page is tear-stained. He’d cried when writing this.

Gulping, Katara squints her eyes to read his small script, so much shakier than the previous pages had been. She can’t read most of it, for the smears and the wrinkling of the page, and she’s not sure she even wants to, anyway, because what she does manage to scan through makes her feel a little sick, her stomach clenching.

—don’t know what I can do, he had written, and it’s all too easy to imagine a much younger version of her friend with tears in his eyes, sobs wracking his shoulders, a lonely figure in a dark attic. — to better, to not so weak. 

There's a series of words Katara can’t make out, but she does catch Father and love.

And then, one shining beacon of hope:

But Mom says—

The writing stops there. She will never know what his mother used to say.

She flips through the rest of the journal, but the pages are hauntingly blank. There are no more entries after that. 

Katara places the journal back where it was tucked and has the vague sense that she’s back where she started.

A strange guilt gnaws at her. Somehow, she thinks she understands Zuko both better and worse than she did before.

[elevenharbor]

Southern Raiders

Happy Zutara Month! Dont know which prompt/day this belongs to…maybe reluctant allies?

[zutaramonth]

Zutara month 2024 Prompts

Reluctant Allies

Diary/Journal

Meet Ugly/Cute

Ashes

Katara kept her scars

Sun Warrior Zuko

Divine Intervention

Actors AU

“You’re Married?!”

Secret

“Mom & Dad are fighting again”

Kiss at Midnight

Breakup/Exes

Exposed

Scarf

Injury Recovery

Reality TV AU

Alter-egos

Rumors

Accidental Kissing

Wrong Blind Dates

Disaster

No War AU

“I wanted to, but…”

First Responders AU

Drunk

“Shall we?”

Rival School Teachers AU

Brightest in the Dark

Time Loop/Time Travel

Reincarnation

Due to the high number of similar prompts that were voted for and for the sake of variety, some prompts have been modified to be more inclusive.

Special thanks to @origo-tentaculum for the graphic