Author's Note: This was originally written for the first incarnation of the Avatar Ficathon and I am only now crossposting it for...well, reasons pretty much unknown to everyone. The prompts I chose to go with were: lost in the fod, tragedy, Zuko/Song, and Zuko/Mai respectively.
She has her father's eyes, her mother always says. Open and kind. Guileless and optimistic.
Until she is sixteen, she takes this as a compliment.
---
She knew the names of every person in her village by the time she was six years old. Her father routinely carried her on his shoulders as he pulled his produce cart through the village, delivering to each and every family. He only visited the marketplace their community shared with the nearby village once a week. Most of his business was right there at home.
The last house on his delivery route was the Wei family. Each time they arrived, Song clambered down from her father's shoulders as soon as they reached the gate and rushed to the side of the Weis' little girl, Su. They would scamper off and busy themselves with children's games, avoiding Su's older brother and seeking his company in turn. Ji loved to tell stories and was perhaps a little too good at it. Numerous occasions found Song running to her father's arms when he returned to retrieve her, frightened nearly out of her skin because Ji had fully convinced her that the Fire Nation army would be cresting the hill just beyond their village at any moment.
On one such occasion, her father laughed and held her close.
"You worry too much about what horrible things might be," he said. "Think instead about things you can control and what good you can do."
She nodded, her jaw set with her resolve, but it did not stop the shiver that went up and down her spine whenever Ji whispered of red-clad men in the darkness.
---
Song knows better than to stare, but she cannot help but take notice. She looks surreptitiously over her shoulder every once in a while as she tends to his uncle. It's easy to do so without him realizing because he doesn't often look in their direction. His posture is stiff and he stares off at something in the distance, though she cannot tell what.
She thinks he might have been very handsome before. She can imagine him smiling, his eyes alight with joy, back before he'd felt the Fire Nation's touch on his life.
When she looks at him, at the ruin of his face and the anger in the way that he clenches his jaw, she wants to help. He is lost and hopeless; he needs to know that he is not alone and that the world is not as dark a place as it can seem. She knows this so well and she feels like she knows him.
She is wrong in a few very important ways.
---
She waits until morning to tell her mother about the ostrich-horse. She wakes up early (she needs to now that she has to walk to the healing house) and does her very best to convince her mother that she only just discovered their steed missing. Her mother is outraged and Song spends as much time as she can comforting her before heading into town.
All day long as she works, Song cannot banish Lee from her thoughts. She wants to be angry, but all she can muster is sadness, pity for what he is becoming. She has seen good men lost before and she thinks she knows what it looks like.
She draws the line, however, at feeling guilty about not getting through to him. She shakes that thought away, purses her lips, and choses to believe that somewhere out there he'll find what he's looking for and maybe, just maybe, she'll see him again once he has.
She would like that.
---
When they came, her mother was at the marketplace, outside, in the open, able to run. As soon as her father heard the screams, he gathered her up into his arms, and she could not hear much beyond his frantic whispering.
"Don't be scared, don't be scared, you're more than them. Better than them. They can only hurt you, really hurt you, if you let them."
The crash when they broke down the door was almost deafening, men with faces like skulls, it seemed, who yelled roughly and made harsh gestures at her father. And she knew, she just knew, if he left her then, she would never see him again.
"You are the good in this world," he said before he let her go, pried her arms from around his neck. They dragged him away outside where people were still screaming. Then one of them turned, looked at her, looked through her, and blithely waved his hand. The arc of flame that danced behind it was almost beautiful, red-orange and shining as it caught on the walls and the floor and began to devour her home.
She could never remember much after that, just the sense of loss still weighing her down, acrid black smoke clogging her lungs, and then a pain so terrible that she could not scream.
---
The first time she sees the wanted poster and makes the connection she feels a lump in her throat and at least a dozen emotions all build up in her chest.
She liked him.
The Fire Nation is a faceless scourge; a island of violent, ruthless, evil men. They pillage and rape and plunder and burn. They enjoy the pain and suffering of their victims--everyone is their victim--and the world would be a better place if none of them ever drew breath again. They are not sad-eyed boys with battle scars who miss their fathers. They do not sit at the tables of their enemies and drink tea and thank them for the meal. They do not gasp with honest shock and mumble stammered "I'm sorry"s at the scars they have caused.
She liked him, felt things for him that she had not felt for anyone in over two years.
She stumbles a few steps backward from the post where the document hangs, turning away as quickly as she can.
She wants to throw up.
---
Song hates walking to the healing house.
The tempo of her footfalls is like a drum beat spurring her anger.
---
Song first asked Xing Lee, the woman who ran the healing house, to teach her when she was twelve years old. Time had passed, but healed few wounds as the remains of her tiny farming village, all the people she had known, continued to scatter, wandering away to escape from memories of what they had lost. Song decided that knowing how to heal the bodies of those around her was a step in the right direction.
By the time she was fourteen only her mother and Ji Wei remained of the original group of refugees that had come to live in their new home. Ji Wei was preparing to leave for the front and she did not want him to go. He was not the same since his father was taken and his mother and sister perished in the fire set to their home, but who could expect him to be? The playful spark in his eyes had all but extinguished and he had no more stories to frighten or delight her.
He trained and trained and trained, and Song watched his stoic countenance and the hopelessness on his face and wanted desperately to relieve him of his pain. Every time that she could make Ji smile was a victory worth cherishing. There were not many such victories, but there were some and as time passed making Ji smile brought her more than the satisfaction of knowing that she had alleviated his pain for a few moments.
The night before he left, he ate dinner with Song and her mother, and afterwards she watched him as he stood in their yard, staring pensively into the darkness, and held her tongue for as long as she could.
"Why are you going?" she blurted finally, and he turned to look at her.
"Because I have to do something. I need to do something."
"Do you honestly think that'll make it hurt less?" she asked.
He stared at her for a long moment and she would have given anything to banish the emptiness from his eyes. "No. But it's worth a shot."
She turned to sit on the porch, and after a moment, he followed.
"You never let me help you," she declared, almost petulantly, breaking the heavy silence.
"Song, you do help me..."
Song turned to face him, surprised, and tried to decipher whether he actually meant it. She could not read him, but his eyes were very green and very close, so she kissed him instead.
"Promise me you'll come back," she demanded backing away for just a moment, hands on either side of his face.
He did not promise with words.
---
Time passes and Song tries to go back to the way she was, but her smiles are empty and she knows it because she still can't banish him from her thoughts. The anger burns through her and she can't turn it off, can't make all the legions of the nameless Them stop having his face. She runs through lists of his crimes in her mind and tries to make the memories of the humanity she saw in him go away, desperately tries not to recall that all too familiar pain, because she knows what will happen when she goes to sleep.
Green eyes turn gold and faces and voices blur and he touches parts of her memory and parts of her that he should be nowhere near.
She wakes up sweating and quivering, heat coiling low in her abdomen, and hates herself even more than she hates him.
---
Song decides that Ji is never coming back.
---
The war ends.
Notice arrives and it seems almost anti-climactic. They were carrying on their lives as usual while the world was changing and it makes Song feel insignificant.
In the following days more news arrives and everyone in town is abuzz with the rumors. The Fire Nation's own prince allied himself with the Avatar. He is the Fire Lord now and the Avatar himself endorses him as a good man.
Song listens and says nothing and continues to do so when news arrives that the Fire Lord will be in Gaoling a few weeks hence (they will not let him set foot in Ba Sing Se Avatar's trust or no) for a festival in celebration of the withdrawal of his troops, a celebration of peace.
The first and last words she speaks of it are when she asks Xing Lee's son and wife if she can join their party when they travel to the festival.
---
Song wanders around the huge, elaborate celebration with her companions, only half-seeing all of the sights. The Fire Lord does not appear until nearly dusk, accompanied by a small cadre of his people and the Avatar himself. Song spends only a moment surprised by the youth and relative size of the world's savior before her eyes fall on the real reason that she is there and will not leave him.
His hair is longer and well-kempt and his clothes are fine. He speaks first and quickly, his tone stilted, and he lets others take over with obvious relief. Song sees his gaze dart to the side sporadically during the proceedings and follows it. It lands on a girl in red and black with dark, dark hair and pale skin and light eyes, her features sharp and striking and perfect, as though she was carved out of marble. That hurts in its own way, even though it shouldn't.
She only looks at him for a few moments more before she turns back into the crowd, but she can swear that she caught his eye for just a moment before she began to move away. She tries to lose herself amongst the throng and is assisted when people begin to move back from the lantern-lined circle where Song assumes that dancing will soon be taking place.
She stands around the fringes, her mind racing as she tries and fails to make sense of what she is feeling. Her efforts are not assisted when she feels a hand on her shoulder and turns to see him right there not a foot from her, and she's so shocked that she doesn't resist as he takes her arm and pulls her with him into the center of the circle amongst various couples swaying lightly to the music.
He looks troubled and she hates herself for noticing, for even coming anywhere close to caring, so she looks away from him as he guides their movement.
"I apologize," he says after a long silence and she doesn't know what to say.
She tries anyway. "Do you honestly think that'll do...anything?"
"I have to try," he says simply.
She doesn't respond and they move in silence for long moments. She wants to be away from him and closer to him all at the same time, and when she looks over her shoulder her eyes search for the dark-haired girl against her will because she understands now. She does. She sees what is and what is not and what will never be. She sees it all for what might be the first time in her life.
"The things you said--" he begins breaking the silence again, but then cuts himself off. "When we met...I didn't realize it then but I-- you helped me."
The urge to slap him is overwhelming and Song stops dead forcing him to do so as well.
"Don't you-- Don't--" she begins and doesn't know what she's saying. Don't tell me what I want to hear. Don't make me feel what I don't want to feel. Don't be like him. "You're a liar," she manages to grit out before she pulls away from him, out of his reach. "Stay away from me."
She doesn't look back to see his reaction but before she makes it to the crowd, to blissful anonymity, she cannot help but see the dark-haired girl out of the corner of her eye, heading directly towards where Song has just fled.
---
The trip home is long and lonely and Song does her best to ignore the chatter of her companions. When she finally arrives, her mother runs to meet her, her face alight with joy. Song can see nothing else and clutches her in a tight embrace, eyes closed. When she lets go, however, the rest of the world comes rushing back and her vision is filled with the incredible sight: a dozen fine ostrich-horses, saddled and well-groomed, tied to newly erected posts, a small mountain of sacks that she assumes contain feed.
Song listens as her mother falls over the words, telling the story of the soldiers who came and bowed, speaking with disbelief about the generosity of the Fire Lord.
"And there's a letter," her mother finishes, pressing a folded piece of thick yellow parchment into Song's hand, the Fire Nation's seal impressed in bright red wax on the front of it. "It's for you."
Song cannot manage words, so she smiles instead, and it does not reach her eyes.
"Oh, I'm sure you're hungry, dear," her mother says just a moment before her lack of response would have become conspicuous. "Come in and eat."
Song nods and follows, picks at her dinner and excuses herself before the sun has even set, citing exhaustion from her trip. Her mother kisses her forehead like she did when she was a small child and Song feels like crying.
In her room, she holds the letter in her hands, stares at it until she hears her mother shuffle into her own bedroom and sees the light peeking under the door flicker out. Then, she rises and walks through the darkness on sure feet. She relights the stove and tosses the letter into the flames, watches as the unbroken seal distorts and runs, watches as the paper curls and blackens.
She enjoys the irony less than she thought she would.
---
When the news of the Avatar's return reached their town, Song did not even try to contain her joy. It was more than a sign or a distant hope clung to tightly in the darkest moments. The Avatar would save them all. The Avatar would defeat the Fire Nation and everything that was lost that could be restored would be.
She knew it. She could see it so clearly, so vividly, that she couldn't stop the little voice in her ear telling her that nothing would ever be wrong again. And what was more, she did not want to.
---
The next morning, Song wakes up at dawn and walks to the healing house.