Quoting Giants
A/N: These drabbles are prompts given at the Katara and Zuko lj community. I may decide to do the others later, depending on … well, a whim, really.
I decided to challenge myself by using a different style from normal. Please let me know what you think of it.
1. "There are in Beauty, a great many things which are enhanced by being seen only in a half-light." –Ovid
She is pretty in the moonlight, twirling and twisting before him, a dance that speaks only of death.
She is beautiful in the misty darkness of the forest, as she stands over fallen comrades, and screams as if her throat would tear.
She is gorgeous when she faces him in the eerie silence of battle, the shifting forms of water the only things worth seeing.
She is an angel half an hour later, when the smoke clears, and there is only one form standing.
But there is no one left to appreciate it.
2. "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired." –F. Scott Fitzgerald
He is always running, chasing, pursuing, hunting. She is always fleeing, chased, hunted. The rabbit holds the mouse as they run from the fox. She runs in leaps and bounds, pauses to rest, then jumps again; he runs to a steady beat and will never stop.
The rabbit's legs lash out, raking at the fox's face, the fox bites down, scarring the rabbit's body. A brief scuffle, blood shed carelessly, before there is only silence.
3. "The world is full of people running." –Elizabeth Swados
She slices a foot open running from him; he cuts his arm chasing her. She runs over frozen water, cursing the sun; he slips into crumbling ice, swearing at the moon.
The sun and the moon chase each other around the world, each one of them waiting for the other to give up.
On they run, to ends eternal, but neither know what they will do when the chase ends. And neither cares.
4. "Hold on to nothing, as fast as you can." –Tori Amos
He is faceless, stepping stately onto the ice as he surveys her ruined home. Behind him stand other faceless men, before an arm is raised, and death fills the air.
Years later a different he returns, faceless still. The snow crunches beneath his armoured foot, and once again she is standing still, clutching at fast-disappearing bravery.
Death rises up in her throat, death and fear and never-forgotten nightmares filled with faceless men and too visible friends.
She is lost amid the mists of memory, and all she feels is fire on ice.
5. "What is sea-born dies on land/ Soft is trod upon. / What is given burns the hand - / What is gone is gone..." – Peter S. Beagle
He thinks her dead, and knows not how to feel. The heat of sun on metal makes sweat trickle down his cheeks, in lieu of the tears he cannot shed.
Yesterday he had been given a chance; to join the good side, to be one of the blazing righteous, to live. Today he is watching a fish die far away from the ocean, eyes eternally open, mouth agape as she drowns on land.
His chance is lost, she is lost, they have lost, all is lost, and he knows not whether to step over her body and finish the evil man before him, or to fall beside her and cry out for another chance.
But then water slowly trickles out of her canteen, and as he watches it slowly sticks to her wounds, and beings to glow.
He steps forward, not over her, but around, and claims his second chance.