DISCLAIMER: I do not own ATLA. I'm just borrowing the universe for creative spiels. :)
Feel free to deign to review. :)
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The first thing that Haru sees is a pale, dirt-smeared face. She has the arrogant bearing of a princess; slow to accept help, and quick to deliver judgment. Haru just smiles, and feels the earth steady beneath his feet.
Stretch, shift, grind; it's the dull grating noise of sandstone against grit, and with patience and time, she's free from her rocky prison.
It takes, days, and weeks to heal the injuries, but some days, Haru can feel the underlying pressure points. The shatter points in the rock, stressing and grinding until force causes it to fracture with loud cracks and reverberating aftershocks.
In time though, he learns that she breaks like fire-tempered sand. She breaks delicately; like glass.
Haru has always preferred water-thickened clay to bone dry sandstone. Tyro may be the man he has always called father, but water and earth run thickly through his veins, painting his skin a darker shade than most. So when she looks up at him with a colonial face and liquid gold eyes, he looks away and kisses her lips instead; Haru knows what it means to be different.
Time passes, and her pale hands darken in the sun, film themselves in the comforting strength of earth, and crinkle with freckles and laugh lines. She lets her hair fall free under the sun, and she lets it lighten and curl, and she lets herself smile.
She looks radiant in pale green wool. His mother spends weeks making it for her, to replace the fading, burnt brown rags she wears. The yellow trim brings out her eyes.
He never asks her about the colonies, and the war, and she never asks him about the slaughter of fire nation soldiers as he and his father drove them from their home province. As thick is the tension is in his village, fire traced, eyes, skin and hair line their way through the faces of the children running through the earth filled streets. She isn't the only person here with eyes like the things they never speak of.
They build a home together. She builds herself a family, out of earth, and rock and unmovable things. Tyro teaches her how to garden, and the look on her face when the first flowers bloom give him hope. The reverent stare at new life fills her face, and Haru loves her just a little bit more.
She hardly speaks to him. She's quiet, as she builds. He is patient as he helps her wash away years of grit and realizes with time that her glassy edges are more like a sharp volcanic obsidian than sandstone pressed together with time.
He has to make a trip to Ba Sing Se once, for their harvest. He needs new tools, the kind that can only be purchased in their high quality shops. She stays behind.
When he returns, she can spin silk. Fish filled dishes and colonial lullabies, and green and yellow paint twines its way through his home. She is radiant and a peace has filled her frame. Tyro and his mother smile broadly as she rests her hands on a swelling stomach.
She doesn't turn in her sleep anymore. She doesn't scream out names and places in a high-pitched tongue that he doesn't quite understand. She doesn't call for her mother, over and over again; but instead, he brushes the strands of hair from her forehead and kisses the nightmares away. She sleeps soundly now, with a hand on her stomach and Haru's hard, earth-centered frame at her back.
Three years pass without event, and she laughs with out cringing now. Although, she still flinches during lightning storms. They are blessed with two wonderful children and a third on the way.
At first she is terrified; she wonders if she will end up like her mother.
(Mother, mother, mother, mother. She never, ever mentions her father.)
(Tyro creeps into that role, like he did for Haru; unyieldingly and with out hesitation.)
Their first child is a boy. His eyes are a pale green against a lighter version of Haru's darkened skin. But his hair is black and straight and he laughs justlikeher.
The daughter comes next, she is golden eyes and pale skin and her walk feels solid like earth. She reminds him of his mother.
His wife is swollen, waddling and threatening to re-conquer Ba Sing Se or somesuchnonsense, when his eldest hiccups blue flames.
He looks at his wife, who looks back at him with calculated horror, (and pride), and he just laughs.
Some days, he wonders if her name is really Ursa, and where her family is and why she loves the sun and wakes him at ungodly early hours. But then he looks at his newest daughter, with her earth green eyes, and unusual black hair painting earth kingdom curls against water tribe darkened skin and finds that he doesn't care.
Haru takes the glassy, muddy, crumbling mosaic of people he calls his own and like his wife, he builds himself a home.
In all honesty though he is slightly surprised the day that Katara comes to visit and she tries to murder his wife. (Azula just shrugs, lets lightning crackle across her fingertips, and invites his ex-girlfriend in for a cup of tea.)