literature

Zutara Week 2014: Cobalt Blue

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Zutara Week 2014: Cobalt Blue

Fire Lord Zuko sat at his study twirling the crown of his station between his fingers. The gold gleamed in the candlelight like the gilding on the furniture and cuffs and hems of his robes and tunics. Everything was red and gold in the Fire Nation, blood and fire. He thought once that those were his colors. After all, they were the colors of his family. They had been his father’s colors and his grandfather’s and his great grandfather’s. Now looking back on his life in the quietness of the night, Zuko realized it was blue that had painted his life. He had been swimming in it and never even realized it.

First, it had been the robin egg blue of Fire Nation skies sprawling endlessly over his head as a child while he played in the gardens under his mother’s gaze.

Then, it was the turquoise seas around Ember Island as his mother dragged him away from the beach to see Love Amongst the Dragons for the fourth time that summer.

Phosphorescent blue had taken over after that as his sister’s flames began to burn hotter and brighter than his own. Odd, he had never realized it before, but it was right after they stopped going to Ember Island.  

As a teenager, he had spent three years surrounded by oceans the color of sapphires as he pursued a mythical child. Three years spent hating the sight of that endless expanse of water. Three years of wrestling with himself and his place in the world. Three years of being rocked to sleep by the waves that reminded him of his mother’s arms.

For one terrifying and exhilarating moment, the world had turned electric blue, and the force of it had etched starlike maps against his eyelids. It had pierced his chest and ripped him open at the seams, filled his heart so full of sparks that he thought he would burst. That electric blue had swallowed him whole and spit him out weak and trembling. He had felt many things at that moment when it struck him with all the weight and force of his family’s ruined past, his sister’s shattered hate. Anger. Pain. Fear. Worry. Guilt. There had been no regret though as he had fallen to the earth.

Everything had gone black after that. Nothing. A void. Then a sweet coolness on his chest as the air filled with an icy blue the color of glaciers. He had opened his eyes, and it was the like the whole world had been reborn and remade around him or maybe it was just himself that had been.

Either way after that, his world had been cobalt blue.

The color of her necklace when it rested in the hollow of her throat, when he had pressed the pendant into his thumb.

The color of her tunic and parka even when they were torn and bloody and covered in dust.

The color of her wedding dress as she walked with her hands overflowing with winter roses down the aisle to him.

The color of her eyes as she woke up next to him in the morning with her hair in a tangle and her gown rumpled while the baby cried for a bottle.

The color of heaven.
© 2014 - 2024 trillean
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artqueen001's avatar
so precious i love it