Special thanks and credit to Rebecca Hb for allowing me to use her (masterpiece of an) idea for this oneshot.
I am on a ROLL! Two stories out in less than a week? This is a total inspirational high for me after, "No-idea-what-to-write-for-forever" Syndrome.
Also, I'm sorry if the first transition is a bit rough. I was originally planning for this story to be 2 chapters long, but the first part ended up being way too short.
The regret Kya feels is instantaneous and bitter. All around her she can hear the screams of fighting and the burn of fire. She weeps as she's taken away, trapped inside the body bag as the soldiers drag her off; as the ship she's been smuggled onto pulls away from her tribe. Her people.
The admiral—Yon Rha—had disguised his spite with empty praise—her compassion was admirable, he'd said. He'd set fire to her home and blackened it beyond recognition, torn her mother-in-law's pendant off her neck and thrown it to the floor, "For good measure," And had some of his men haul her off, unnoticed in the confusion of battle.
Try as she might not to cry, she weeps all too often after that. In the bag, on the boat, in the Fire Nation... Sometimes, she scolds herself for it; her tribe adapts to the circumstances, and they flow around. They don't lay there, wallowing in self-despair when action was so vital, but she is powerless here.
She's presented to the new Fire Lord just after he's crowned. "An exotic beauty," Yon Rha says. Wrapped in silks and bejeweled from head to toe, she stares up at the new sovereign. He only sneers back. The court hisses.
Fire Lord Ozai doesn't touch her at all. She waits in his room night after night, terror gripping her every nerve those first few weeks. But he never comes. When he does, he walks past her, pretending she isn't there, and sleeps. Kya is confused, but she doesn't question it. Eventually, this becomes mostly routine, but sometimes they talk to each other. He about his duties and children, about his wife; she about her life in the tribe.
You can learn much about a person, if you're their only confidant.
He never wanted Lady Ursa for a wife, that was something forced upon him by his father, the old Fire Lord. His daughter is prodigious, perfect, and shrewd. He's very proud of the young princess—she is all his hopes and more. His son is quite the opposite, and in Ozai's eyes, the prince never does anything right. A miserable failure and nothing more. Every time he speaks of the boy, Kya is left speechless, mind reeling and unable to comprehend how any man could be so dismissive of his own child. She concludes that he cold and callous—Fire Nation. Perhaps incapable of feeling at all.
Which makes it all the more baffling when she finds him sobbing one night in his sleep. She keeps her silence. There are too many walls between them, they are too far apart. Breaching that could be suicide, she reasons.
Prince Zuko is banished the next day. She thinks of her children, and again, she keeps her silence.
Life goes on.
The day the prince returns marks a change in the Fire Lord: he snaps and growls, ill-tempered at the best of times and monstrous at the worst, brushing off her attempts to calm him with their little chats. He's busy with plans on the invasion, they say. The resistance is stubborn.
The day of the invasion, she's taken and hidden away once again, this time in a small chamber underground that Princess Azula's Dai Li created just for her. She hears anger—the pure ring of metal on metal, shouting, static crackling, an explosion—though she has no idea what it might be.
Later, she's told that it was the prince. The Fire Lord gets worse, or so she assumes. He won't come to bed at all, so she never sees him.
All the while, she's expected to walk about the palace, keeping herself worthy of the Fire Lord and his attentions. No news of the war gets to her, which is no big surprise. Her hair is oiled and combed, and she is given new gowns to wear. But that doesn't stop the the tension in the palace from thickening more and more as the days pass and Kya wonders what to expect.
The war ends. There is a new lord to please.
The new lord is Prince Zuko. Or Fire Lord Zuko, now. A sixteen-year-old young man who's spent the past four months traveling with the Avatar to bring the war to an end.
Sixteen years. Close to Sokka's age.
At first, Kya—terrified and at complete loss at what happened—skittered away with him at every chance, doing whatever she could to go undetected. This worked for about six months (the court had—perhaps intentionally—forgotten that Ozai had had a Water Tribe partner), until the head servant started harping at her to fulfill her duty to their sovereign. A new heir to the throne will not create itself, he claimed, and a union between fire and water would do wonders for peace.
Frankly, Kya didn't see how offering her body to Prince Zuko would do any good. The thought of a young man willingly sleeping with a woman old enough to be his mother was a hard concept to for her to understand. But she's learned through years of experience that the priorities of the Fire Lord are very, very skewed. So she agreed.
And now she waits, trembling, for Ozai's son—"He doesn't deserve to be called that. The boy's nothing but a pathetic disgrace."—in all her jewels and silks. It's as if she's been thrown back six or seven years to her first night in the Fire Lord's bed. Months ago, they said that the prince—Fire Lord—is too sentimental, weak, and foolish, but at the same time short-tempered, reckless, uncivilized, and crude... Kya's long, painted nails dig deep into her skin. She's suffocating.
The door opens. She can't suppress a flinch.
When Ozai had (a lifetime ago) first seen her, he'd brushed right past her, instructing her to get a robe, lie down, and stay quiet. He hadn't even looked her in the face. After she sees Prince—Fire Lord Zuko for the first time, she dares to hope that this time will be different, although she doesn't know how.
Kya has never met Ozai's successor before this moment, only having seen him at a distance during his father's time. There's much of Ozai in him—his eyes in particular—but she also sees quite a bit of the elusive Princess Ursa there as well. His carriage is different from her past bedmate's: Ozai was strong, powerful, coiled, and angry. But his son? The first thing he does is stumble into the room and lean against the door to shut it closed. Then he proceeds to blow a long, drawn out sigh upwards and cause his bangs to flutter as he sags. The best word to describe him, Kya decides, marginally more at ease, is weary.
The double take almost makes her want to laugh. Almost.
She shifts.
His head flies up at the racket her jewelry makes, and he gapes. She offers a weak smile, gripping tightly to the arm of the sofa she's sitting on.
"Hello—"
"Who are you?"
His voice too is different from Ozai's: raspy and higher pitched. For moment, she wonders if Princess Ursa sounded similar, but dismisses the thought.
"I..." she bites her lip, unsure of what to say next, "...am..." Her head shakes on its own accord, leaving her feeling more like a small, lost child than anything else. She decides to take another route entirely, "I was taken from my home years ago, and presented to Fire Lord Ozai as a coronation gift."
He stands, eyes wide. "You've been here six years..." he mumbles; there's something distant in his voice when he says that. Kya bites down harder before he continues, "You're his concubine."
"Yes."
The fatigue returns, and Fire Lord Zuko slumps. He does nothing for a few seconds, letting his head droop to the floor. For what, Kya doesn't know, and she thinks it better not to ask.
"Well," He raises his arms wide, gesturing to the room around him, "What do I do?"
"...what?"
He coughs awkwardly and rakes a hand through his hair, steadily turning as red as the tapestries on the wall. She feels the strangest tug of...affection for him, just for a moment. "I mean no offense...Miss. You're very beautiful, and uh...charming, I guess. But you're more than twice my age..." Flustered hand squeezing. "...I, don't really, ah...know what to do."
Warm, warm, glorious relief. "Well, we could start with introductions."
"Oh! I—ugh, sorry. I'm no good at this. I'm Zuko." He raises his head again, offering her a shy smile. Slowly, she gives returns one in kind, "My name is Kya."
He bolts up with no warning, as if lightning just fell down from the sky. She starts in response.
"What?"
Kya doesn't know what to make of it; the fumbling, gawky teenager she's just met crosses over to her in two big strides, suddenly towering over her. His father's rage lurks in his eyes as he first stares down at her, but it ebbs away. She doesn't know why.
"You're—You're—Sokka..."
Something inside her—something bitter, and sharp, and yearning—physically lurches. She takes a deep, shuddering breath.
"How—how do you know my son?"
He pays her no mind, gold eyes (Ozai's eyes) pale and frantic. "You're their mother..." He continues.
His eyes narrow.
"You're supposed to be dead."
She swallows thickly, frozen. There's a dead weight now, thunked to the pit of her stomach. Something new is beginning...
o~O~o
In the weeks that follow, Zuko ceases to be the Fire Lord, and becomes more of a friend. Kya is glad; the life of a concubine is hard on her, she who never fully abandoned her values as Water Tribe.
He tells her all about his time away from home: as an Earth Kingdom refugee, the Avatar's Firebending teacher, a banished prince at sea... She enjoys hearing of her children the most.
Sokka has become a brave, brilliant tactician and soldier, trained by the master in the way of the sword. Katara has become a powerful Waterbending master, prodigious in skill.
They helped save the world.
She's so proud of them, more than any parent could ever claim to be. Every time she hears of their adventures, her heart wants to burst, singing and pure. Tears water in her eyes, but she listens in spite of it.
Sokka glued a fake beard to his chin and paraded around with it for days, insisting that his new name was "Wang Fire". Katara lost her temper in the Northern Water Tribe and battled her grandmother's ex-fiance.
They haven't changed at all, but they're entirely different people.
It puts her spirit at ease each night, recalling Zuko's words. Playing the stories over and over in her head, wondering how they've changed, what they look like, knowing that they've both become so brave and so strong...
Alive.
Spirits, they're alive.
She drifts to sleep each night with tears of laughter and joy streaming down her face.
o~O~o
"Do you want to see them?"
The question comes unexpectedly to Kya, who's been engrossed in a book on old Fire Nation folklore until then. She looks up from the dusty volumes to see Zuko—in all his Fire Lordly splendor—rubbing his neck.
"Do you want to see them." He repeats, though it doesn't sound like a question this time.
"Who?" She closes the book.
"Sokka and Katara."
Her heart stops, and she chokes on her next breath.
Zuko pinches the bridge of his nose, sighing. "They're coming to the big banquet next week. Sokka's representing the Southern Water Tribe, and Katara's coming as the Avatar's date." He grimaces, muttering, "As if it's not perfectly clear they're going out already."
"What?" Is all she manages to say. That seems to happen a lot these days.
He sits down across from her, shuffling awkwardly through the dozens of papers and scrolls sprawled across the table. He looks worried. "Miss Kya?"
No. No, no, no, no, no. She can't. She couldn't. Why am I so scared? It's only my children, what's the worst that could happen?
Ozai's voice, cold and sharp and bitter, despite the time passed, echoes through her head. "My child? It seems you're just as hopelessly naive as ever. I don't even know why I speak to you, sometimes. A child can turn out to be completely different from what you expect. You could be told how strong, how ferocious, how honorable they are a million times, only for it to have been nothing but lies."
"No," she whispers, "No, no. I can't. I—I just—" She bites down her lip. Hard.
Zuko's gaze is gentle, so gentle, so unlike Ozai's. And even in her panic, Kya can detect the sad understanding that lingers within.
"Ozai knows nothing about love." He says simply.
It's amazing how effortlessly one sentence can break.
"You—you don't understand..." she stammers, "So much has changed...they're so different now, and..."
Kya trails off and lets her head go limp and droop, her hand wandering to the very spot where Kanna's pendant once rested. When she looks up, she's startled by the intensity she sees in his eyes.
"What don't I understand?" He asks. It's such a simple question, and his tone is just as soft as before, but his eyes never leave her. "What it's like to have abandoned family? How much they miss you? How much they'd love to see you? What it's like to have to grow up without a mother?"
Princess Ursa. A sharp, acrid knife plunges itself into her heart. She reaches for his hand, but he turns away.
"You have no idea how much Sokka and Katara miss you, how much they love you... If you decide to run away just because of what my fath—what Ozai told you, then you're only half the person I thought you were."
He leaves her in cold, dead silence.
o~O~o
Her hands tremble, her eyes sting. Kya blinks the tears away.
They're dusty and smell like mothballs and old spices from all these years of disuse, but there are no holes and they're not worn. Good.
Slowly—for the first time since she arrived—Kya lays out her own clothes on the bed. Her best Water Tribe blue.
She turns her head to the window, imagining the outline of a ship, its sails billowing gently in the wind.
She prepares to meet them.
I totally went overboard on the semicolons and dashes, didn't I?
If any of you are wondering about the part where Zuko just randomly says, "Sokka..." here's your explanation: Sokka looks a lot like his mother (kind of ironic that he can't remember her face, isn't it?)
Anyway, be sure to review because each one is worshipped, cherished, and replied to no matter what the circumstances. And be sure to point out any spelling and/or grammar mistakes because I'm sure there are a lot.