This for Crushed Under Love for being cool and writing something for the iCarly challenge of finishing my story.
I hope you enjoy!
Disclaimer: I neither own Avatar nor disrespect Mai or Maiko. But I still rather her with Teo
White Embers
His mother wanted him to move on and no one seemed to understand why he couldn't… well no one except the sixteen year old girl by his side.
It had been four years since he'd imprisoned his own sister, and since his sister had pushed him over the edge in a singular moment when she struck his girlfriend with lightening. He supposed Azula had no real friends in the scheme of things anyway. She didn't seem to regret it, because she claimed getting to him was worth the sacrifice.
He crouched down at that spot where he watched her fall, felt her lifeless wrist for sign of a pulse and heard the cackling laugh of his sister. Scattering sand from Ember Island over that spot had become tradition, ever year on the anniversary it happened.
He didn't know why she came every year. She told him it was because his mother wanted to be sure he wasn't going to run away and join the fire nation rebels.
But he knew when she was lying sometimes just as much as she could feel it between her toes when anyone else was.
When he arose she pushed a Pai Sho tile into his hand, and he ran his thumb over the grooves of the lotus carved on it. It was a not so secret code to let him know that they would always look out for each other. The White Lotus code.
Zuko had always struggled with looking forward when the past made such an impression on him. If he had realized it sooner he wouldn't have waited until the eleventh hour to join the Avatar and he wouldn't have waited until the fourth year to notice the girl beside him that had already won his mother and Iroh's approval.
"If you're going to cry just get it over with as this is taking longer than usual." She interrupted his thoughts as he stood there perhaps a moment too long.
"Can't you see I'm grieving!" he replied, deeply annoyed.
"No I can't see!" She exploded at him, four years on and he was still doing that.
"Well you should feel it then."
She concentrated on the vibrations below her. "I feel a lot of things but grief isn't one of them."
He clenched his teeth, "I lost my girlfriend."
"And I lost my Pai Sho tile. You move on."
"How am I supposed to move on? Just how am I supposed to do that?" He stood in front of her, arms accusing, voice accusing.
Toph could sense her opening. She stood on her tip-toes and grabbed his collar, laying one on him right there at that very spot.
"That's how you move on!" she shouted at him.
He leaned in to kiss her again, all too quickly forgetting the disrespect it might show the dead.
Zuko wasn't one who found moving on to be easy to accomplish, but he was one to make up for lost time.
Three cheers for Zuko moving on!