The Ashes Stairs

(The triple apology of fire)

So...a three shots. I am not sure it is too normal that I have been translating this, since it was the only story no one voted for on my profile... Even that Lovecraft crossover got one vote, you guys are just great! So I hope it doesn't feel like I'm making fun of you or something. The next chapter of "To Honour the moment" just takes so long translating, partly because I'm unhappy with the French dialogs and trying to change them...Ugh. I thought it would be nice if I could at least post something else.

And to be honest, I'm going tomorrow for a ten days long, hopefully life-changing field trip in the Alps with my fellow geology students, and I want to post this beforehand so I can cultivate the vague hope of getting a lot a reviews by the time I come back! Next chapter should be up in about two weeks, in any case.

Those three stories were all written some time ago (the last one, especially, was written shortly after the ending of the Avatar series), and are all some indirect apology of firebending. Mostly details I found interesting or puzzling about this element. Boy, do I suck with introductions.

Have a good reading!

Soon hatred will fall apart

It is the cold that will kill him at last, Zhao decides. The cold, not the lack of oxygen, squeezed from his lungs by the inhuman grasp of the spirit and, soon enough, by the dark water shimmering under his legs. The cold, not the suffocating fear of facing the bluish creature, illuminated like in an absurd nightmare by the moon he was not able to defeat.

The cold.

The failure. The lone death in a hostile land.

There seems to be some logic in the very unreality of the situation. Inescapable. Perhaps it is this sense of fatality that paralyses him, sucks in all the protests he might have uttered, reduces him to silence more efficiently than the monster's cold hand crushing his chest. Yes, all too logical. Killed by the spirit he could not destroy.

Yet his eyes, instead of staying still and dignified to face his fate, search the foreign town. They look for more familiar a colour than the white of the snow, or the ghostly blue dragging him to his death, or the translucent frost crystallizing all the way to his bones.

He searches, and his gaze fall on a young man, covered in burns and scratches, barely standing on a great ice bridge, whose bright golden eyes stare back at him in consternation.

Zuko the banished prince. The foil, the enemy, the rival and the target.

His perpetual failure.

Perhaps that, too, is fate's design. This being who named himself "blue spirit", this being Zhao has tried to kill three times already, always in vain, Zuko, standing here to witness his fall.

Zuko is not wearing the smirking mask, though. On his scarred face, in his asymmetrical eyes, there is nothing to be seen but horror and shock: fate startles him. It always does. The boy just does not match up, the general used to think, he never was able to live up to his birth. With his injuries, and the white mercenary's clothes, he looks stateless. Pathetic. The child could collapse at any moment: Zhao knows he is exhausted. He could see him shiver as they fought, and with each blow the shock seemed to shake his whole skull.

Zuko beat him, though. Again. In the eerie light, where everything merges into the same translucent blue, only the boy's eyes remain of the same intense gold as he watches him, and does not understand.

"His eyes are of the purest, most intact gold. It is the Sun itself that runs in his veins. He will be a great master."

Zhao cannot remember the name of the inept courtier who said those three sentences to Lady Ursa, fawning over the wailing infant who, years later, would challenge him to an Agni Kai and beat him. That cursed weakling who in ten years of training had barely managed to learn the basics of firebending… A surge of hatred gives him an illusion of warmth. However the spirit's grip tightening on him prevents any expression from showing on his face.

He cannot remember a time where he would not have hated Prince Zuko, son of Ozai. He will never admit that this loathing started way before their duel, that it might have started before the prince was even born. However the contours of time are fading in front of imminent death. He is not sure he knows what never means anymore.

Zuko starts running towards him. The gold of his eyes shines in the dark, and Zhao still cannot read the expression inside. Steam comes out of the boy's mouth, as if in spite of all his tiredness there is still fire in his lungs. And so Zhao remembers, confesses. He takes the thread of his life and goes back in time, for the first and the last time.

It is a long way backwards, more than twenty years in the past. At that time there was no Prince Zuko nor general Zhao, only Zhao the novice, the prodigy, and no Zuko at all. There was a teacher as well: a grave man whose eyes still seem to look at him with disdain, whose name is Jeong Jeong.

There begins the hatred, fed with insufferable helplessness.

"You have no control, Zhao; all you do is destroy. You will never be a true bender."

For months he had tried this absurd exercise, again and again. Always in vain. He who usually never needed more than a week to master a move. Sour rage. Yellow bile. He never should have wasted his time like this, never, striving like a fool to maintain a small flame on the ground without burning the grass. Perpetual failure.

You will never be a true bender.

From this time, this one sentence came the hatred, the secret loathing of his rival whose fire licked the grass, trees, tapestries, shelves brimming with books, and none of those detestable things ever, ever burned.

The first time Zhao had witnessed the wonder, the prince was having a tantrum in the royal gardens. Jeong Jeong was no longer a teacher but a deserter, and his exercise, the perpetual failure, had been relegated long ago to the rank of inane anecdote it deserved. Zuko must have been eleven or twelve.

Zhao would have broken his spine.

He would have destroyed his face, like Lord Ozai did a few years later, the same hatred? It could not be…

He would have burned his too-bright golden eyes, those eyes that never paid attention to the intact tapestries and grass, as though the impossible solution of this nightmarish exercise had never given him any trouble, as though he always knew what Zhao would never find out.

You will never be a true bender.

Hatred of having to wonder whether Jeong Jeong the teacher would have admired Zuko the rival.

And above everything else, hatred of knowing that Zuko will never hate him like he loathes (envies) him with every fibre of his being. He will not hate him, no matter how many times Zhao will stab him in the back or have him hunted down like an animal.

The cold is already gnawing at his mind; his thoughts are getting blurred. Soon there will be nothing but the dark depths of the ocean and the monster's piercing blue.

He has always hated Zuko, and never understood him. That may be why he never wondered by what miracle or spell the child survived his ship's explosion. That may be why he is only half surprised by the pale hand, covered in chilblains, that he is holding out to him tonight.

Zuko's voice is weak as he desperately offers his help. In his eyes circled with burns, whose limpid brightness always contrasted with the madness of the general, there is nothing to read but incomprehension and fear.

He is very young, this boy he has been trying to destroy.

Zhao hates him. However even this fact seems very far away now, loses its consistence as the water nears and the cold sucks in his breath.

And thus, rather than staying still and dignified to face his fate like his rank would have required, stupidly, all in all, he carves in his slowly freezing mind the picture of two eyes of molten gold, devoid of hatred, and takes it with him to the bottom of the ocean.