Chapter Text
“Come on guys, I want to show you my favorite dog! He’s a real sweetheart.” Aang said excitedly, voice raised to be heard over the loud barking that filled the air. Katara and Sokka followed behind, Katara looking around and coo-ing at the animals as Sokka frantically took ‘artistic’ pictures and boomerangs to post to his Instagram. The eldest of their group was proud to boast a couple hundred thousand followers. He had deleted comments, and his friends hadn’t had the heart to tell him that 99.9% of those followers thought that it was a parody site making fun of ‘artsy’ Instagram accounts. The .1% was the two of them.
“I think it’s great that you’re doing this Aang, this seems like the perfect place for you.”
The younger boy grinned with a blush as he accepted the praise. “Thanks! I just really wanted a place where I could help out!”
“And play with cute animals.” Sokka said with a snort.
“That helped.” Aang admitted, dragging them along to one of the back corners of the shelter, the section with less cute puppies wagging their tails and squirming, and more hardened looking dogs who watched them warily with low rumbling growls or furious barking. He of course, lead them to a cage where the dog was doing both.
It was a huge beast, a husky mix likely, though it was hard to tell. It looked like the dog had been shaved bare recently, though inexplicitly it’s fluffy black tail hadn’t been touched. The light smatterings of bristly fur that was starting to grow in on the rest of him did nothing to cover the smattering of scars that littered a body just this side of starvation. It certainly didn’t hide the huge burn that stretched fully across one side of the dog’s face. It covered his squinting gold eye completely, touched a bit of his snout then wrapped around his head to completely mangle one formerly-pointed ear.
The dog’s face was a mess of color, from the pink skin, the black fur trying valiantly to grow in, gold eyes, bright red burn, and the bold white teeth that were stark against his lips as the dog maintained a constant warning growl. The growl only got louder as they neared, until it morphed into the loudest, most grating barks that the sibling had ever heard. Still, Aang continued forward as the monstrous dog started snapping, pacing, and lunging against the kennel wall.
Huge black-padded paws sent the kennel doors bulging as the dog snarled and threatened, his raspy barks drowning out the others in the shelter. Huge teeth snapped, and only the bars of the cage separated them from the children’s faces as the dog stood on long legs. Its tail lay inert between its legs, moving with the furious lunges of his body but not in any way that even remotely hinted at a ‘wag’.
“Uh, did the meaning of the word ‘sweetheart’ change when I wasn’t looking?” Sokka asked as Aang moved towards the cage latch. Aang simply grinned at him and slipped into the kennel.
“Wait!” Cried Katara frantically, obviously not expecting the boy to actually go in. She looked around in panic for a staff member who could stop her friend from being mauled by the beast.
However, the dog had backed away from the door as Aang opened it, and while his growls and ear-splitting barks did not cease, he was no longer lunging but pacing back and forth along the back of the kennel. Aang sat crossed legged on the cage floor and scooted forward until the dog had no more room to pace and it lay down with a huff. The growls and barks continued, but it did nothing more as Aang started freely petting its short, bristly fur. “His name is Blue Spirit, or Spirit for short. They found him in the alley behind the Blue Spirt bar. We’re pretty sure he was abused.”
“Duh.” Sokka muttered, but Katara jabbed at him with her elbow.
Aang continued, seeming to barely notice the interruption. “They even sent some officers to the bar, but no one would confess to recognizing him or his owner. I know he looks pretty scary, but he’s actually really sweet.”
The dog snarled, and let out a sharp bark, as if protesting the characterization. Aang immediately cooed and scratched his back harder. “Yeah, youse a sweetheart, yes youse are.”
The dog growled again, but didn’t so much as snap. Instead, he seemed to be leaning into Aang’s touch more and more. Katara cocked her head before moving to go into the cage as well.
“Wait!” Sokka protested. “He was psycho like 2 seconds ago, I don’t think this is a good- no of course you don’t listen to me. Why would you listen to me?”
The girl slipped into the cage and shut it carefully behind her. The dog eyed her warily, but didn’t even bother to growl at her like he had with Aang. Instead, it huffed out an irritated sound and looked away.
“See!” Aang beamed as she hesitantly knelt beside him. Katara offered her hand for him to sniff, which the dog did exactly twice before looking away with another huff. “He can tell if you’re nervous and isn’t so loud. He’s actually loudest once he starts to trust you. It’s kinda cute.”
The dog jumped to its feet, barking loudly into Aang’s face as though in protest. Sokka let out a bark of laughter and finally entered the, now cramped, cage as well. “Don’t worry boy, you aren’t cute. You’re big, tough, and scawwy, right buddy?”
Blue Spirit growled at Sokka, making him yelp, but the older teen didn’t move from his spot in the cage. With a calculating glance at his friend and sister, Sokka pat the dog on the head twice, as which point Spirit seemed to realize that no one was really intimidated by him anymore and turned to attack one of the rawhides in the cage. The dog brandished the toy at them when he tore off a chunk as though to prove that his teeth were powerful and to be feared. The group simply cooed at him and resumed petting.
Zuko huffed and dropped the rawhide, collapsing with his head on his paws. This kind of stuff never happened to Azula.
“You should see him when little kids come in.” Aang continued babbling.
Of course, Azula was a much, much better shifter than him. A prodigy. Just thinking the words left a bad taste in his mouth. That may have been the disgusting dog food he’d been forced to consume for the past month.
“They don’t usually come back this far, but if they do then he doesn’t do anything. Just lays down calmly in the back like a good boy, no barking, no growling.”
Zuko was not a good shifter. He just didn’t have good control over his shift.
“And I swear he glares the ones that do scare the kids into submission. I saw a toddler pull his tail once and he didn’t even flinch.”
That wasn’t to say that he shifted unexpectedly like the movies portrayed it. That wasn’t the issue, that had never been his issue. His problem had always been the opposite. He was great at maintaining the shift, both as human and wolf, but transitioning between the two? That was harder.
“That’s really sweet.” The girl replied.
He growled again in rote protest against Aang’s favorite descriptor for him, but the new boy had just found that spot behind his good ear and he was too busy pressing into that hand to argue any more.
The shift that took his family seconds would take him several minutes of intense concentration. The more emotional he was, the longer it took. It had been taking a lot of time lately.
“Okay, fine, he’s growing on me.” The strange boy said, obligingly digging into that spot even harder. The girl was running her hands over his back, and Aang was carefully looking at his paws in a way Zuko knew was an actual vet’s trick. He wondered idly if that was what the boy was interested in doing. Volunteering in a shelter would be a good move if he was.
If Azula had been woken up in that alley by animal control (Azula would never have fallen asleep in an alley. He wasn’t sure what she would have done if she’d been kicked out and disowned and was half-starved and homeless, but it wouldn’t have involved sleeping in a dirty alley after licking disgusting drying beer off the ground in attempt to get any moisture into her parched body) she would have just shifted, yelled and threatened, and they would have walked away embarrassed that they had mistaken a girl for an animal, convinced it was a trick of their minds.
“I knew he would.” Aang said proudly. When had his tail started wagging? Why couldn’t either of his forms be good at lying? “Just don’t get too close to his face, especially the part with the…”
But not Zuko. By the time he had the been able to fight through the exhaustion, hunger, and blurriness from his reluctant drink to even start the process of shifting, they had already forced him into a cage in the van and were slipping that stupid hoop-stick thing off of him so that they could close the door. He’d been so distracted on trying to shift that he hadn’t fought properly to escape.
A stupid mistake.
One of many.
“I can’t believe someone could do that.” Katara said softly. “Especially to a dog as sweet as this.”
He hadn’t been a dog at the time. He’d taken the form of a loyal son. That had been another mistake. He once thought it was a mistake he could fix. He’d given that up the night in the alley. Now he could only hope that this mistake wouldn’t be as permanent.
“Well, that’s the thing… you see-“
“Aang, we cannot get a dog.” The girl protested and Zuko blinked. They were getting a dog? Oh, right. “You know what Officer Fong would say about pets.”
Zuko’s brows furrowed. Fong… he knew that name. That was one of the officers who placed people into witness protection. More specifically, he was the officer who had organized the concealment of a witness known by the codename Avatar. The witness who supposedly held the key to ruining Father’s entire livelihood.
“We have Appa! And Momo!”
The witness who Zuko had been relentlessly hunting for months on Ozai's orders..
“We have Appa because he’s a licensed, therapist prescribed therapy dog to help your trauma and keep you from accidentally karate chopping people.” The boy said bluntly. “We have Momo because you can sneak him around in your pocket when they move us.”
The witness whose capture was supposed to ensure that Zuko could return to his home, to his family.
“It’s not karate, its-“
The witness who he had given up searching for when yet another dead end left him with an empty stomach, and a tiredness that allowed him to finally give up on the insane dream that Father still cared for him at all.
“Aang, if I have to listen to your list of martial arts that you’re magically good at one more time, I’m going to fall asleep on the dog.”
Zuko would have growled at that, but his mind was moving to quickly, his heart feeling like it was exploding in his chest. It couldn’t be. Avatar was supposed to be a hardened gangster, or a skilled hacker, or shrewd fixer, or… not a kid. He wasn’t supposed to be some kid.
Aang pouted. “We aren’t supposed to have social media either, Sokka.”
Maybe it wasn’t. Fong had to have several cases, right? (Never mind that Avatar was supposed to have two companions, not eyewitnesses but people he had told everything. Codenames Boomerang and Bender)
“I can’t disappoint my fans Aang. Besides, no one knows it’s me. There are no faces, no names, no comments, I don’t even tag our locations.”
Zuko had to know. Fong was good. It was hard to get any information on Avatar, but Zuko was able to get a few tidbits here and there. The pertinent one: he was supposed to have tattoos. Supposedly he had blue arrows on his head and hands.
The girl sighed loudly. “Not this argument again.”
He had hair covering any head tattoos, and Zuko didn’t see anything on his hands, but he had to be sure.
“Great, then we can go onto a new argument. So, Appa is great but he’s more my dog than anything because I have to take him like, everywhere. You guys deserve a pet too and Spirit is- uh. Spirit?”
Zuko had risen to a sitting position and met Aang’s eyes before leaning over and very deliberately licking a large swath down the boy’s wrist. His tongue came away covered in a bitter tasting powder that sat thick and heavy.
“Did you guys see that?” Aang asked, voice raspy in awe. “He’s never done that before, with anyone. It’s a sign!”
“Awww.”
“Aang. That does not change anything.”
“But Katara-“
They were arguing, but the words were rushing around Zuko, lost in the blood rushing in his ears as he stared at the small wrist, and the pointed tip of a tattoo that he had revealed.