Story Summary
This is the way the world falls; this is the way the world crumbles. How our choices and their consequences ultimately draw the lines between mirages and reality, and how sometimes, there is no line.
Series Summary
In wake of trauma, we tend to forget things, ranging from small to large. But usually you don't lose all memory of a previous existence… unless, of course, your world has changed in the blink of an eye. And the more things change, the more they stay the same, up until that one day when you'd rather be anywhere but here.
Pairings
Most likely Zuko/Katara and Aang/Toph, though the Zuko/Katara may get switched to Zuko/Mai. Though my foreshadowing at this point is all towards Zuko/Katara. Sokka/Yue is set in stone though, for reasons you will find out eventually…
Notes
I know, I know, another story. Another AU story. But this has been eating at me for ages, and my other stories are being written (Full Circle: Daybreak should be up soon, and for Patterns of Rain and Smoke, I'm taking a little time to map out the plot and include some foreshadowing, like I have in Daybreak and this…).
Names have been changed to make it more realistic (do you know anyone called Zuko?). But the changes are beyond obvious.
This is a reincarnation fic of a different sort - or so I hope. I revert back to my usual style of original fiction angst, which is quite different from my other stories (unless, of course, you count some of my one-shots and drabbles, but I'm not counting them). The first chapter is not so much in this style, but the rest… Hopefully I've weeded out the mistakes - if not, feel free to point them out. The Chinese text beneath the title says 'mirage' in Chinese. I'm fairly sure it's accurate (I didn't use an online dictionary, I used my textbooks and help from my family).
anywhere but here: part one
f a t a m o r g a n a
蜃景
chapter i: rainstorms
If I find within myself a desire no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
- C.S. Lewis
drip drip drip
silence save for your drip drip drip
of rain and stormy nights
wind against my window
nothing but music to my ears
lightning blue and blinding
if you do not stop i may go
insane with this knowledge
of something that does not
exist and never will
for your drip drip drip brings
back silence and nightmares
that different drip drip drip
not of rainwater and hazy mist
but of crimson stained liquid
on my floor
She wraps her jacket tighter around her shaking frame, and draws her knees closer. Thunder rips through the silence, deafening her and terrifying her. She has never liked thunder; she doesn't know why, but the mere thought of lightning horrifies her. It is one of the inexplicable mysteries that have always plagued her, but then again, she has many of those.
She gets used to it after a while.
Raindrops drip steadily from roof to ground. She squeezes her eyes shut, clenches her fists and hopes to dear God her brother is safe. It is paranoia; she knows that.
It's just that she just can't shake herself of the notion that lightning is bad (dangerous, horrible; she has many words that spring to mind, and blood is always at the forefront; always). She pushes that idea out of her mind; locks in away in that corner where she locks away everything else painful and nightmarish. That corner is no longer a corner; it is a collection of nightmares and dreams and memories of things that have never happened (can people breathe fire and freeze water and move rocks and draw clouds); she knows they aren't real.
Sometimes, though, she gets the feeling that they are. And she's right. Just not in the way she thinks.
A loud ringing; some vague song that plays on the radio day and night - she jumps, pressing a hand to her chest, her breathing heavy and erratic. She reaches blindly for her phone; she doesn't want to move. She is comfortable and safe where she is.
"Scott?" she asks anxiously, clutching the phone and biting her tongue so hard she can almost taste copper in her mouth.
A dull static greets her. She muffles the choked sound that her throat makes, and then repeats her question.
"H-h-ey… 'Rina?" he replies, his voice distant and grainy, but still definitively Scott's voice.
Katarina sighs in relief, her grip on the phone loosening a little. "You're… you're okay, right?"
Her brother babbles on for a few minutes about how he's sorry that he left her alone in a storm, and Selene feels bad too, and please don't think too badly of him for it. She answers back hurriedly, telling him not to worry and she's been fine, she swears. They banter back and forth on the subject for a while, and with each passing second she twists a little more of the cord around her finger. In the background, she hears Selene talking.
"Put her on the phone."
Scott hesitates; Katarina can hear him asking Selene something or other.
"Hello?" comes a soft voice, and Katarina smiles.
Outside, the rain drips down in steady streams, and lightning flashes, casting an eerie glow to her face.
He glares at his tea, willing it to disappear or evaporate or something. He doesn't want tea. He doesn't need this now. The soft bubbling of something (Ah Yi is making soup, it seems) fills the kitchen, and the sound is starting to grate on his mind. His tea, however, remains on the table, and his Uncle is watching him carefully.
"I don't need your sympathy," he spits out through gritted teeth. "I've come this far. Two years, Uncle. I've gone two years without him. Father can go burn in hell for all I care."
His Uncle admonishes him gently. "Zach, I know you're bitter, but think of what your mother would say."
"Mother would support me."
"Ursula would not want her son to throw away his life like this."
Zach turns his glare away from the tea and to his uncle. "Mother was weak."
His Uncle looks at him - no staring, no glaring, not even a frown. His Uncle just looks. But it's that look that's loaded with disappointment and weariness and who knows what else. He has never been able to resist that look; it is an example of what his Uncle has gone through for him, and just how little his Uncle gets in return. Two years banished from the Main Mansion and forced to stay in the secondary one; the one where only those of distant relation stayed. And to anyone else it'd be pure luxury. To him, it is his penance; he sinned and he is paying for it (not the first time, he thinks, but then again, he has many strange memories of things that have played out differently).
He is estranged from his Father for good, his sister despises him and his mother is gone.
And all he has to show for it is his scar.
There are photos on his desk, photos tucked away in dark corners and stacked away in locked drawers. There are photos that he never ever wants to see again; photos of a time when he was happy and they were happy and everything was perfectly normal and they were perfectly normal. There are photos of a time long gone by; a time where his mother was still there, where he didn't have an angry, raw scar covering his right eye.
He never wants to take those photos out again, and really, no one can blame him.
He turns over onto his side, trying to block out the sound of rain dripping and thunder crackling. He hates rain; it reminds him of a person he's never met, a girl he doesn't know. And if there is one thing Zach hates, it is not knowing the full story. His room is silent; always has been. He doesn't know anyone well enough to invite them around. He has his so-called friends, and the girls that fawn incessantly over him, but he doesn't know them at all.
He doesn't even know himself.
The silence reigns on, save for the soft splashes of the rain merging with puddles.
She stretches back on her bed, ignoring the fact that she might muss up her hundred-dollar hair (she didn't want it anyways; Mrs. Bei Fong had forced her to go to the hairdressers). Stacks of books lie on her bedside table, and she rubs her eyes with her free hand. At times, she gets the feeling that her sight is something new; something she didn't use to have.
It's a strange feeling, but she guesses it might be her overactive imagination. She can't feel vibrations; never has been able too. She can't twist spoons; she's not a magician. She can't make rocks fly around and shatter; she's not some character from a fairytale. She can't do any of these things, but in the dream world she created when she was five, she could do them all.
Her dream world is just that, though. A dream world. It isn't real, not at all (maybe once upon a time in the fairytales she indulged in when she was little, the ones that ended in happily ever after).
Sometimes she wishes it was.
Her wishes never come true, because if they do, her parents will see her for her. Not for the perfect little lady they wanted.
But they don't, and that is her biggest problem.
"Miss Tora, your tea."
She thanks the maid. The woman makes to enter her room, in order to set down the tray. In annoyance, she takes the tray, haughtily striding away.
"I'm not useless," she remarks in anger, and dismisses the servant.
The steady pounding of the rain against her roof starts again, and she sighs. Wisps of steam rise from the cup, and two (small, delicate) biscuits lie on the saucer, arranged artfully. She doesn't see the point in such frivolity, especially considering both biscuits are small enough to be devoured in one mouthful. They are another one of her mother's ridiculous spending habits; apparently they are the trend among wives of the rich and powerful.
Honestly, she thinks the whole idea of tiny biscuits is stupid, even more so when pretty patterns in chocolate have been elegantly baked into them. She figures that the idea was cooked up by some overpaid chef with too much time and too little common sense. It doesn't really matter to her that much anyway.
A book lies open on her bed; a story of a different place in a different time, one where people can bend rocks and make things move of their own accord, the one where a bald boy with too-large ears and a not-broken spirit has to try to save the world, the one where that boy from across the road has a ponytail.
The one where she exists and not only exists, but lives and breathes; where she can fight and stand her own.
The one where she has freedom.
The one that isn't really a book, but a collection of scribbled down dreams, and messily drawn sketches of people she barely knows and has never met.
And sometimes, if she tries hard enough, she can almost imagine that her spoon is just a little distorted.
For some reason, she has always associated wind with the boy in the book, the boy she's never met and doesn't actually exist - the boy from her dreams, the boy with the clouds and the large smile.
Tora Bei Fong doesn't like storms. The wind carries with it nostalgia that doesn't belong to her.
And by some twist of fate, her windows rattle as if on cue, shaken by the wind.
He stands there, silent and thoughtful. Two graves side by side, two names carved in stone. Two names of two people he never met. The fact that it is raining eludes him; he has no eyes for anything but the two headstones.
Xia, proclaims one marker. Etched into the stone are two dates, three words and a hundred memories. The other is just as simple, a carved Hei, two dates, and a lifetime of love.
He runs his fingers over the etched letters, imprinting them into his mind. If he closes his eyes and drags back faded memories of his lost childhood, he can almost see them. Xia, he thinks, would have been beautiful, with soft grey eyes that lit up whenever Hei walked into the room. Hei, he thinks, would have been kind; kind and thoughtful, with a warm voice.
Rain slides down the stone in rivulets and embeds itself within grooves, with each droplet reflecting scattered light and making the stony black surface shimmer. He draws his hand away slowly, eyes still taking in every detail.
He will not be back for a long time. And so Andrew closes his eyes and says a little prayer.
He hopes his parents will forgive him eventually.
The taxi ride home is long and bumpy, and while Gary as kind as is humanly possible, he cannot replace parents that Andrew will never have again. He rests his head on the sill, staring out the window at the speeding car lights and towering skyscrapers. Raindrops fleck the window, and it mists over where his breath touches it. He traces his finger through the mist, drawing patterns and stories in the mist.
A jet of fire, a spiral of water, entwined around one another. A rock falling apart, with a gust of wind swirling around it. Four Chinese characters he vaguely recalls from his lessons. A faint outline of a girl's face, staring back at him. She looks vaguely familiar; he supposes he may have met someone who looked like that before. It is not improbable.
He hovers his fingers over the picture in the mist, almost afraid to touch it. Some part of him has the strangest urge to whisper, 'I'm sorry,' but he has nothing to be sorry for. The girl is someone he doesn't know.
Gary watches the boy out of the corner of his eye, and sighs.
He knows more than he lets on, and the girl in the window is an all too familiar face.
Rain pounds away on the taxi roof, and Andrew tears his eyes away from the picture.
Slowly, amidst the deluge of rain, four souls carry out their lives, unaware of one another. And slowly, the world revolves on its axis, pivoting around as unbeknownst to them, four lives slowly shift around to become what will be their future.
And slowly, the paths of fate reshape themselves into new ones.
And as the world changes, the rain continues its steady drip-drip-drip.
A/N: Hei means Air in Cantonese. Xia means those clouds at sunset in Mandarin, or horizon. You can choose. They aren't his parents' real names, because I invented them. And then I was all '… oops, this is in modern-day,' but I suppose I'll leave them there for the effect. Besides, my parents have Chinese names, and I live in Australia. So it's quite realistic, I think.
Poem in the beginning is mine. It's sucky and horrible and I hate it (because it's a terrible excuse for poetry) but it's mine.