Disclaimer: Konietzko and DiMartino own A:TLA and its characters
Summary: She's broken and he's abused. They're a black-white tragedy together. But - vulnerable - they can feel for help and hope for love.
The copper piece is ugly.
A truly disgusting feat of time.
It's bruised and dirt-ridden. Many a number of shoes have kicked its face, ignorantly.
The copper is faded, too. Appearing to be an imitation of currency. Not actual currency.
And everyone will look, seeing a scar (of the shallow kind) on the world's economy.
It is something to laugh at.
But its owner is new, a different hand.
This one is soft. The white cotton of pillows. The fragile cushion of bread after crust.
She is a new nice, careful of its insecurities.
She picks it from concrete like a blood-red cherry. It drips with an unlike past from her own.
She smiles.
It is beautiful.
He has youth, a fresh face, and innocence when the vase shrieks into fragments.
It is not his fault.
But the vase shatters against the marble floor (it's rudely cold) and screams something foreboding.
Zuko is not familiar to it. Not yet.
Once a singularity, is now a thousand sharply edged children. There is risk in each corner. An odd chance to draw blood.
His knees fall and innocence scrambles to pick up the pieces. Determined.
A ghostbuster from childhood television, this is his occupation. He captures the ghosts in little fingers because he's just a child and fumbles for a surface. A better ground.
Eyes on baby ghosts, he is new to this problem. The solutions present themselves much like the fragments in his cupped hands. He wants to fix it. Innocence tells him he can fix it. He will use diligent hands and care to build the vase again. And maybe - just maybe - from the sharp ghosts, he will stitch a semblance of faith in character.