Title: Clavos de Canela
Character: Zuko
Pairing: Zutara
Summary: Zuko dreams in blue and brown
Notes: A present for Irrel, to make up for her bad day. Then I realizes the Zutara fandom in general needs a pick-me-up, and made it slightly more public...
Warnings: Spoilers for Seasons 1-2.
He remembered it on a day of rain.
The sky turned a steely gray, and frigid winds slipped through every dent in the stone walls. In the streets, the dichotomy between Fire and Earth was accentuated as the invading soldiers fell prey to the cold, a flurry of thick crimson mantles and small bonfires against the dark greens.
It came in the hands of the messengers who brought forth the first of Azula's weekly tribute (her revenges were always like this, weren't they? Bloodletting the other into despair?), wrapped in cotton cloths and empty promises of good faith. The smell curled about Zuko's nostrils even before the offering was unwrapped.
The tall grasses turned golden in the morning light.
A strong, sure hand upon his shoulder.
"Brew it into tea, and it will keep you warm". The smile on the elderly man's face seemed broken, lacking, as Mai carefully examined the cinnamon in search of poisons. The princess smilingly waved off the offering once they were alone ("I never had much of a taste for Earth Kingdom spices."), earning it a place somewhere in the storages. The bags were not accounted for ("They are rare, Lady Azula, but their practical use is limited beyond shamanism and cosmetics"). Nobody would have missed them, had they been stolen. Yet he only needed one.
In the past, he always associated cinnamon with the Sun, and henceforth, sunlit days. The memories grew dim as murkier, colder days pushed them back, no matter how he grasped at them, at the people he lived them with, at any chance of making their luster permanent.
Thin arms hidden within crimson silk as they rocked him to sleep.
"You are a good boy, Zuko. One who will become a good man."
As he lay the precious spice upon the new desk (he couldn't help but feel nothing in the room was 'his'), wafting its pungent, sweet aroma towards his face, he reached within for remembrance, willing the smell to revitalize them. He wished for his mother. His father. Uncle Iroh before his perfidy (or was it the other way around?).
Blue eyes…
Perhaps it was the rich brown color of the blessed item. Perhaps it was the rain drawing crystal trails down his window. Perhaps it was the strength with which the day he both rose and fell is etched into him. In the end it didn't matter: he recognized them.
Eyes, like the sea, like unpolished gemstones, like the fears locked away with his childhood toys. Small, nimble-fingered hands, drawing long strips of water to her.
At first he was enraged. The cinnamon claves were thrown out the window to their demise in an effort to exact vengeance for their duplicity, all irony lost in the water cascading down from the roofs. The green pouch, lost in his outbreak, was forgotten as he prepared for bed.
"If I rest…I will be left alone" were his innocent thoughts.
Only when he was jolted from a nightmare unremembered, craving the earthly, saccharine odor once again did he realize he was lost. As he retrieved the pouch from the dusty corner where it fell and pressed it to his face (the dust attempted to coax a sneeze, but he ignored it), he relaxed the vice-like grip on his grayed memories, mourning their loss as shades of blue replaced the fading gold and crimson.
She returned, as soon as he closed his eyes.
These days he no longer fights her.
He sees her as he saw her first, a child barely concealing her fear as her pristine white world ruptured slowly. She shifts again, a creature of the wild matching his resolve with her own in thinly veiled, feral devotion to her cause even while firmly tied to a tree. He barely recognizes her amongst the snow, strong and sure, and even less so amongst the luster of crystals.
Dark russet fingers slide over his frigid ones, warm in a way he doesn't remember. They reach up to touch the unfeeling skin over his eye, their weight foreign.
"Maybe you could be free of it."
He dreams of dark skin against bright eyes and thick hair that curls like incense smoke, every night. Sometimes it is juxtaposed with his, others it may only be appraised from afar, but her presence is there and that is all that matters. Zuko wakes with the taste of ocean water still on his lips, drained from the energy (made of guilt and passion, and all the things she stirred within before she left) she gifts him on their nocturnal encounters and rids him of with the first flashes of consciousness, leaving him to face the day as a gaunt specter.
It nearly amuses him that he once goaded her with his connection to the sun, nearly intrigues him how she has overturned even that as he prepares for the day, with Azula commenting on his deterioration light-heartedly as a different exhaustion nearly makes him fall face-first into breakfast.
The day's duties are performed with mechanical efficiency, reminiscent of days on a lone ship sent on a mythical errand, but without the tinges of color (Iroh took that with him to the prison cell), his eyes lingering a little too long on the Earth King's art gallery pieces as they are taken off to who-knows-where. "It's odd to know of an Earthbender with such an obvious passion for the sea" is all the guards can comment.
He drags himself through the routine until twilight. His duties are unofficially over as he heads for the terrace, the one facing west.
Sun and Moon greet him there. Though one is waning and the other begins to wax, the sight of both in the sky brings some breath back to him, even as he hears the guards head to the armory for support weaponry, responding to their own diminishing strength.
Were he to attempt any trick, the fire would come slowly, the flames thinner and weaker, demanding more of his energy. But this energy he has little use for as the moon grows larger, as the sun sinks beneath the mountains, silver beams mingling with the red as if in good-bye, before the golden glow is completely pulled away.
He accepts the cup of tea (cinnamon, always cinnamon) that has become customary to him at his time and place, and says nothing.
The Earth Palace is not a permanent housing. They will be rushing back to the Fire Nation as soon as Azula can find a suitable governor and has frightened the people so thoroughly they will not even contemplate a revolt (the latter of which is not too difficult to achieve).
He has not set foot within the palace, his palace, in years. He does not know if it will feel more like a home than Ba Sing Se does. He does not know if his memories await him, if that is the place where blue eyes have chased them to, where he might find them again, invigorated. Maybe they will have even come to life again.
But then he thinks of cinnamon, of blues, of a black speck on a darkening sky (a bison, he remembers), and can only wish, to a heaven that he had long turned his back on, that the Moon in Sozin seems as close, as tantalizingly near his fingers, as it does on Ba Sing Se.
Or if it will simply put more land between them, more than there already is, and even the dreamscape will not be enough to connect them.