ZW 2012 Day 6: Faded

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Wrinkles in Time

Mai reflects on an old painting.

Mai held the old painting carefully, her aged hands gripping the deep creases along the wrinkled sides of the papery canvas. It meant so much to her, but the time for it had passed. As always, she sighed and put the painting back in its drawer, slamming it closed with a resolute thud. As always, she opened it and pulled out the painting again. As always, she traced her finger over the faces drawn in faded ink. Might as well. There wasn't much else to look at in the cell, cushy as it was. For a traitor's cell, anyway (even if Zuko didn't like to use the word "traitor". He preferred "political hazard").

The painting was sixty-four years old. She had been seventeen, young, impressionable, ignorant. He had been confused, antagonistic, angry. He left with a letter, and she never went back. It was over for sixty-four years, and it would be over for another three hundred. But she did miss him. Yet it was, after all, sixty-four years gone. She was eighty-one, with bitterness creeping into the edges of her mind, like fire eating away paper, when she thought about the past.

And he, well, he had been happily involved with that Southern waterbender for years after he walked out of Mai's life. They had married sixty years ago. Tom-Tom had come to visit her a month before nearly bursting with excitement over the anniversary-no Fire Lord had managed to be married that long since before Sozin; it's practically a national holiday, Mai. Regardless of her feelings on the matter, Zuko and Katara were celebrating sixty years of marriage with their three grown children, seven grandchildren, and the two infant great-grandchildren. Their relationship was cemented with more than a flimsy piece of parchment inked in a style that had been obsolete for decades.

She loved Zuko more than she feared Azula, but she'd never known love to last, and death lasts forever. Just the same, sometimes she wondered if she had miscalculated.

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A/N: Another piece written back in the day that's been…edited. This one was actually less difficult than the last. Sometimes I think it would be fun to flesh this out a little more and actually do a real story on what-if-Mai-didn't-betray-Azula. Is that something people would be interested in reading?

Thank you to all readers :).