To Honour the moment
Here I am again, trying and failing to shorten my delays! Thanks a lot to you all for encouraging me in spite of everything! I have at least some good news: I could finish another (and longer) part of this chapter during the summer, so next update will be in exactly one week. I'm so happy to be able to say that for once, you have no idea. XD
Just a warning about chapter 4: I don't want the whole fanfic to be merely about Angst, and I hope it doesn't feel that way to the reader. Still, I was completely into Lovecraft's sh ort stories when I wrote the French equivalent of this chapter. Just so you know. :-)
Thanks to Avocadolove for beta-reading!
Chapter 4: For to dust you shall return (Part 1/3)
The snow crunched under his boots, giving an insistent rhythm to his every step. The sound seemed deafening in the silence of the South Pole, like cracks of thunder. Zuko took a fierce pleasure in every one of them as loud as possible. The sky was pale above him, white and cold like the blinding, lifeless landscape he was trying his hardest to break with the sole strength of his feet.
His neck was stiff, his head held high: his eyes never left the glacier belt which gleamed weakly less than a mile away. His back was tense, had been ever since he had gone past the village's walls. Steam had been pouring continuously out his mouth, his fists clenched for a whole hour.
He had left without ever looking back, letting the sceptical face of that so-called warrior who thought him mad disappear behind him, and doing his best to ignore the wide-open eyes of the Water Tribe girl, eyes that had looked so much colder all of a sudden (hostile?). Trying, mostly, to not think about the shocked, pained expression on the Avatar's childish face. No way was he feeling any guilt. He wouldn't let his anger subside.
It was all that kid's fault anyway. The damn fool. He shouldn't have tried and talk to him. He shouldn't ever have been the Avatar and for Agni's sake, he should definitely have grown up faster!
The prince's shoulders were so tense it was nearly painful. It prevented him from shaking too much, though. Sometimes it even made him feel like he didn't suffer from the cold, like he didn't have to fear the bite of winter. He didn't want to be calm.
It was that kid's fault that in a hundred years he hadn't even been able to learn two of the four elements, or an ounce of common sense. His fault that he had thought it clever to follow Zuko everywhere for a whole week (and Agni knew he wasn't in the mood for that, sick and alone, trapped in an enemy village whose habitants would stare at him like in all their miserable existence they had never seen a scar). His fault that he insisted on continuously talking to him about some Kuzon, while it should have been obvious that Zuko didn't want to speak to anyone. His fault that he had chosen a time when the firebender had been training, when his hands and blood had been gorged with fire, unable to stand any more of that cold, pale depression, to urge him with his high-pitched voice to play with him at sliding on some autochthonous creature.
His fault that the absurd invitation had been enough to shatter the silent torpor Zuko had drowned himself in ever since his waking, in a desperate attempt to escape the questions (the terror) threatening to crush his sanity.
His fault, thus, that the banished prince had thrown a fireball the young airbender had barely managed to dodge, and that he had roared at him for Agni knew how long, as loud as he could: he was not the damn kid's friend, he never would be, had he forgotten they were all at war? He had been ordered to capture the Avatar, and he would catch him and finally go home, he would defeat him for his land and for his father, he would have his honour back…
He had had the feeling that his voice was going to break on the two last words, perhaps due to the long days of silence that had parched his throat and numbed his tongue. So he had hastened on, screaming he would also find his crew and his uncle. He was sick of all those people taking him for a refugee and a lunatic (why did they help him anyway?). He would prove them wrong. He was going to find out what had made his ship rust and his crew disappear. He was going to put an end to this absurd situation right now! And as the villagers came running towards them, drawn by the racket, he had turned on his heels and, furious and determined, he had headed for the glacier belt and the metal skeleton rotting inside.
Needless to say, there was no going back.
Each breath Zuko took burned his throat; he wasn't used to scream for so long. The cold was beginning to seep under his clothes, making him shiver in spite of the wisps of steam hissing against his skin, but he refused to take notice. It would be like admitting the inhabitants of the South Pole were right, that handful of peasants who had for some unknown but probably degrading reason decided to heal him, and who thought they could forbid him to walk along their frozen land as long as his convalescence would last. Zuko gritted his teeth.
He had been able to go outside the igloo for four days. Ten days had passed since he had lost consciousness in their village. Thirteen since he had woken up for the first time in an ice-cold, empty ship.
He was feeling perfectly alright, thank you very much.
His curses kept him busy for about an hour; a too short time during which he could focus solely on an indefinite feeling of hatred. At last he could erase from his mind the sinister ship lying as if in wait among the icebergs, erase the tiny village behind him, until there was nothing in the world but the sound of his boots crushing the snow, the angry footsteps on the white landscape, and the imperceptible steam of his breath, hot and supple in the frosty sky.
Hate. Refuse. Live.
Only once he reached the shadow of the glaciers did Zuko slow down, their bluish cold drowning his anger. For a moment he had to stop on the ice. The ground and walls all reflected the vague outlines of a small, red form, hands clutching its forearms in a vain attempt to keep itself warm. Agni knew why he always had the foolish impulse to pause in that damn corridor…
Frozen to the spot. As though the ice sculptures and their eerie shadows drew a frontier, ice-blue and threatening, an open door on a nightmare.
Beyond the glacier belt, and in a radius of several dozen yards, the snow had been swallowed by a black swarm. The ship seemed to have kept on collapsing in the space of a week. Even from a distance, the young prince could make out the rust staining its sides like a filthy fur. The black dust had merged with the snow and spread like a pest. It looked like the earth had split where his ship had been moored, and that the festering wound was widening on the ground.
A bitter wind made him shiver to the roots of his hair, briefly, before Zuko was able to break the spell paralysing his limbs. His blood started circulating again in his arteries; he shook his head to dismiss all remaining doubt and, loftily ignoring the broken figures on the ice walls, he crossed the invisible threshold and stepped into the light.
Let the villagers think what they liked: it wasn't rash impulsion only that drove him here. He was already walking among heavy lumps of iron that stained the snow. Tiny bits creaked under his boots, mocking, yet he didn't look down.
A ship cannot rust in one day.
Soon enough he arrived to the ship's rotting side. In spit of all his will, he couldn't prevent a jagged hole from drawing his gaze, the place where his arm had sunk in the giant corpse, where he had thought he had heard that nightmarish laugh, where fever had made him delirious. He struggled to take in a deep breath.
There is something wrong in there. I'm going to find out what.
They will see. I'm not mad.
That last thought gave him strength. Anger, too, a slight nauseous feeling like the taste of metal, but mostly strength. Before the feeling could fade he took a step towards the opening and gripped the jagged edges to look inside. The wall creaked when he touched it; two plates of rust came off under his hands. Taken aback, he watched the rough, brownish iron crumble between his fingers.
Bits of rust kept coming off the ship's side, widening the entrance; the outlines of a crumbling corridor were gradually appearing. Raising his eyes, Zuko gazed with the same strange fascination at the imposing war ship, whipped by the polar wind. The iron didn't hold there, either: another, darker dust merged with the frost that the gusts carried.
A stream of smoke licked Zuko's lips as he breathed out, warming up the air around him.
The iron didn't hold.
Looking at the state of his ship, one would think it had been rusting among those glaciers for a good hundred years (it hadn't, damn it!)
So why hadn't it collapsed yet? (because it didn't have any reason to collapse after a week!)
What was that rust anyway? (I don't know, I don't know, I don't get it…)
One last bit of iron fell in front of him, like some eerie invitation, completing the jagged door that led him inside. It almost didn't make a sound: only one brownish scrap rolled in the dust with a low, skittering noise. Some weird impulse made the firebender withdraw his leg before it could touch the tip of his boot.
He could hardly see the corridor from the outside: nothing but a deeper shadow disappearing into the rust. The air inside was still, dusty, barely warmer than on the ice field. For a moment Zuko hesitated on the threshold, his head turning a little towards the glacier belt, far behind, that separated him from a more natural world.
Zuko froze as soon as he was conscious of his own gesture; his face set, I said no going back! And, as though the Water Tribe peasants had been able to see him look back, he fixed his eyes on the darkness, called a flame that rose rumbling from his hand, as if to consume the ceiling and his palm, and went in.
