DEAR DICTATOR → zuko

╸twenty four : finding peace

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❝ finding peace ❞

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     NARI LEAVES RYO'S yard with a stunned numbness. Her brain is a static web of chaos and thoughts, and the person who strung it is Zuko.

     Ryo said Zuko was okay, Tana said not a hair was touched on his royal head, and there wasn't a hint of falsity to prove it. If he wasn't hurt, or thrown in some cell, or tossed out of this village, then that means... he left.

     He left Nari.

     Not a word, not a letter, no goodbye, no sign of anything. He just vanished...

     Nari's eyes prick, and her face becomes an electrical storm brewing on a murky horizon. He left me? He left me... After everything, that prince packed his things and abandoned her high and dry. Truth be told, it hurts. It hurts a lot. There's an ache stronger than her muscles, more frail than her bones, and be it sadness, betrayal, anger, or all three...

     It hurts.

     She isn't quite sure what to do, with tears threatening at her eyes like a full cup under a dripping faucet. Going back to Tana's is a brutal reminder that no one is there for her, finding an alley to sleep in does the exact same, and no one else would cater to her needs. It is just her, just Nari and the fire waiting to explode beneath her palms.

     The thing about Hengying is that it is caught between three landscapes. Plains, woodlands, and mountainous edges. A creek runs through it all, and many miles along its path, it thickens into a great bay. There are places to hide in the woods, but trees that scrape the skyline are claustrophobic and overwhelming. The plains are vast and wide, but wheatfields that tickle her palms aren't comfortable to think in. It might be a trek, but Nari makes a clear cut run for the mountains.

     She does not think her wounded limbs can carry her up ridges and unpaved paths, but grief is stronger than her own muscles.

     Her feet land her upon a clearing in the mountains. The altitude is not evil, and her ears do not yet pop with pressure from where she's sitting. She doesn't need that pressure, doesn't seek it, as there's already enough weight on her shoulders.

     The stars are fading in the sky, their light dimming by a forthcoming morning. The moon, just a pale sliver in the sky, grows white against its gray opponent. The wind blows with a hesitance to the mountains, carrying the fresh pines up from the woodlands below. The fields of the meadowy plains below are distant, trembling with a spring's welcoming bloom, and Nari breathes with the dusty land.

     Zuko. He's gone, actually gone. Gone, gone. Nari has no way to chase him, and even if she did, it would be an embarrassment to face him. He left for a reason, whatever that may be. And who knew that after all this time following the Avatar's trail, she'd end up trying to track Zuko? But she's not... She's tracking his thoughts, tracking his decision making:

     Why did he leave? What prompted him to do this? What got in his head and said: 'Hey, you know what would be funny? Vanishing without so much as a word.'?

     Was it her recklessness on the Lei Tai? Was it the way she hugged him moments prior, held his hand with her warm skin against his? Was it from showing him Hengying, or the gap of life she took on between her home and her search for the Avatar? Was it the north pole, how she contributed to their failures? Was she an inconvenience to him? Some dark stain that would take from his honorable return?