Swallowed In The Sea
"You belong with me, not swallowed in the sea."
Zuko remembers seeing Azula's shy friend going up to him and whispering those words into his freshly burned now turning scarred ear like a threat.
He left the Fire Nation, still thinking of her words, her maturing voice, a hot breath, and wondering if it was too late to turn back.
"Get lost, and then get found."
Mai saw the ship leave the harbor and wondered what would become of her unrequited love, if indeed he would be victorious and bring the Avatar back, or just a failure as Azula had always predicted.
What worried her more than his return, was his life. The storms at sea were unpredictable, the waters unkind, the ocean spirits constantly seeking vengeance from the sun. She doesn't pray, she never does, but this time, just maybe...
"I'm loving all you see, those streets you're walking on, a thousand houses long, well that's where I belong."
She often spends her time daydreaming about what he is seeing, the people he is meeting, and the roads that he must be traveling on his honorable quest. One day I am going to be the empress of this entire world, she silently swears.
"I can only blame myself, you can only blame me."
After three years they meet, but nothing is the same and it never will be. He's lost in another world where they question honor, redemption, lost youth, and what it means to be right and wrong. She's still stuck in the youthful summers of their country where they are right and you are wrong, and the sun is always shining even when it rains.
He hates listening to her speak in the usual lackluster way, but listens nonetheless. However, his thoughts dawn on another time, in another place, where he is not one of them, but is one of us and has found contentedness in the arms of the ocean, rather than in the throne of an ever-consuming fire.
"Yeah, you belong with me, not swallowed in the sea."
Mai finally catches the traitor in the embrace of the ocean, gold meeting blue, and finally feels rage for the first time. How could you leave me for the sea her eyes and mind silently screams the question, her knives my only friends to seek the answer within flesh and blood of.
But she'll never know why, none of us ever will, to be one of the unrequited is to always be stuck in-between the hardest part and the twisted logic that is of life and love and chaos and of death.
"The hardest part was letting go and not taking part. You go backwards, but then you go forwards again."
-FIN
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A/N:
I've never really attempted (any sort of) Maiko before, so if this sucks horribly, now everyone knows why. Writing Mai is a lot harder than I thought, too. I think I wrote her too out of character. I was going for a sort of bored-on-the-outside-lively-on-the-inside sort of thing for her.
The prompts came from the songs, "Swallowed In The Sea", "The Hardest Part", and "Twisted Logic", all by Coldplay.
Reviews are awesome.