Shell Shock
Summary: I am drowning in a pool of hazy mist that coats a darkness over my eyes. A constant fog surrounds me. I feel as if I am hearing, seeing, speaking, all underwater. Somewhere submerged deep inside me something is screaming, hysterically crying, breaking, but it is so far down that I hardly notice. Yet it is ever present, a nuisance to my hazy reality that annoys like a persistent gnat. Disturbing images plague my mind and memory, taunting in their familiarity... So I sleep.
Katara POV
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Shadows
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Zuko... we need to talk.
His eyes meet mine across the ice and something heavy gathers in my throat. I know what he will say even before he opens his lips.
He sits beside me and reaches for my hand. But my hands are tangled in my necklace of blue, they hold no room for another. He pulls his hand back.
He tells me then how the world is now. How strange and different and defeated it is.
He tells me of fallen earth kingdom walls and slave mines filled with the people who built such walls.
He tells me of melted ice palaces to the north and its people rounded up like chattel to serve a bloated flame.
I know all this, I expected no less. But when he tells me that my kind, all the waterbenders were the first to be rounded up and slaughtered. Executed. I feel the telltale signs of tears rising. There is an itchiness behind my eyes and I wants to rub the angry heat away.
Then when he tells me how all the children, all the infants, all the innocents were taken, massacred, I feel something break again inside. I had thought I had no more tears left to cry, yet they come. Treacherous, traitorous tears.
But somethings is missing, without sense. Why was I not killed along with my brothers and sisters? Why was my life spared?
I ask. His eyes flicker off me and away quickly. Too quickly.
I ask again.
They needed you alive to keep me in line. My father seeks to control me, tug and pull at my strings and send me dancing any way he pleases. He fears the next avatar to be born into water. So he sends me here, his lackey his pawn, to do his dirty work. To make sure there are no children born to water. To make sure there is no avatar. He knows that I will do nothing to threaten his rule with your life hanging in the balance.
I don't understand.
...why me?
He reaches again for my hands. I let him take them.
You have to know your all I have left.
I could remember the Zuko from before. The Zuko full of anger and never ending drive. Zuko never quits... right? Wasn't that what we had always said. Only this man in front of me, this shadow of a boy I once knew, is far too tired to be Zuko. There are lines on his brow and marking his mouth and his eyes are old and worn. He might look like Zuko but he is not. And I am not Katara. Not really.
We are shadows of our former selfs in this shadow filled world. This world that is not right.
I feel the hopelessness that marks his face swamp my own.
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The italics are spoken conversation.
Usually I let the words fester in my brain before I put pen to paper (er hand to keyboard) but with this chapter I forced it out of me like a stubborn... well you get the picture.