A/N: I'm not dead, I just haven't been around computers for a while. As I will be for the next week or so as well. Sorry about the lack of updates, but hey, what can I do?
Oh, and for the readers of Rain, I made a trailer for it. The link is in my bio.
Title: Smoke
Author: Red Hawk K'sani
Word Count: 277
Warnings: Character death, Zuko angst, dark, confusing, Run-on sentences of DOOM
Challenge: None
Characters/Pairings: Zuko, Iroh
He watched silently as the flames grew taller and taller, like some kind of warped plant from hell. Smoked billowed up above him, black as the moonless night sky, dark as the shadows of his dishonor, hopeless and infinitely pigheaded as his mind, a perfect mirror of his soul—a dark, disdained whirlwind of thousands of guilty thoughts and regrets, of wasted opportunities and lost days. Of stupid wishes and fake consolations that told him everything is going to be all right, and you will wake up tomorrow and this will all be a dream, and uncle will be sleeping peacefully and snoring like he always does.
Stop it, stop it, stop it! He wanted to scream out at the consolations, tell them they were wrong and that everything is not all right, uncle is burning and dead and he will not rise from the ashes like the Sages say! How can Agni accept him now that he dies a traitor? His soul will just burn like the rest of him, and it will be nothing but ash. Oh Spirits, oh Spirits, I cannot deal with this.
It is all right, everything is fine, it is just the smoke distorting your mind. You are dreaming, dreaming, dreaming…
Such a wail of pure anguish and lamentation echoed through the night, sending chills up the platypus-bear's back and making the fur of the vulture-lion stand on edge. The sound reverberated through the treetops and to the villages and towns for miles and miles, and made the people who heard it stop in their tracks, shiver in fright.
Oh Spirits, oh Spirits, oh Spirits, Agni is not a merciful god.