You're welcome, and thanks for the karma!
I'm working on the rough draft of one of the scenes in my postwar fic and hopefully it (the scene i'm talking about) will be done before too long, but something i can post now is the link to my
new deviant art gallery, which currently features 3 Ursai pieces (and nothing else, yet lol). ^-^ Hope you like it.
Edit: I finished a scene from the first chapter, so here it is. (I've been influenced greatly in writing this fic by another postwar Ursai fanfic called Despising Pity--i forget the author's name, but it's on FF.net--which gigirl942 and i both like very much.) There are several references to canon lines, but I'll let you see if you can recognize them.
Hope you like it!
2nd Edit: I forgot that you have to add italics in manually in a forum post, so i've fixed that now.
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The first time the lonely tower felt her presence, the coming of that lady in the night was heralded by a shadow in the doorway of a moonless cell. Recognizing the contour of the dark silhouette on the floor--it had been years, and yet how could he not know that form?--the prisoner froze amid the dust and gloom, not daring to look up at the only one who had ever been able to see behind the cruel and emotionless mask of a tyrant.
Apparently the spirits were unmoved by the silent plea for mercy he'd sent up to them--
I can't face her, not now--thus proving that all of their ethereal race had long ago forsaken him, for the visitor slowly came forward to kneel on the cold, dusty stones just on the other side of the bars. No matter in what dingy corner his eyes sought refuge, the fallen Pheonix discovered that it was futile to hide from her quiet, steady gaze--he could feel it searching and piercing him like a surge of glowing cosmic energy. With turmoil and quandary burning inside him--
like nothing else does, any more--he rasped out her name, and then a single syllable that demanded, that begged to be answered.
"Why?"Why have you come back to me now, when I've lost everything? Do you intend to mock me, or offer the pity that I hate?With the calm serenity that had soothed his own fiery spirit in days long past--
why is it touching me even now?--she spoke at last.
"I haven't come to mock you." She had always understood him as no-one else could, more deeply than he understood himself.
Of the words and reflections that passed between them--his of bitterness and despair, hers of peaceful reason and age-old sorrow--there is much to be told, but it will not be recounted here. Suffice it to say that at last, the prisoner knew his defenses were crumbling before the quiet, unwavering siege of his opponent's desire to break through his shell (
and that gaze, that piercing gaze he could not meet). Scouring his mind for a means of saving his mental fortress--
my internal lonely prison tower--the defeated monarch suddenly found the power to once again stoke the fires of his anger to a roaring blaze.
"Enough!" he thundered. Hands clenched at his sides, the prisoner rose swiftly to his feet. "I will hear no more of this! You will not convince me that you have no ulterior motive in coming here, and I have absolutely no desire for whatever sympathy you see fit to bestow upon me." While venting this tirade, he began pacing restlessly in his cell like a caged mooselion (
don't look at her, whatever you do), releasing pent-up fury by slamming a fist--devoid of energy and heat--into the rough stone walls. (
I lost it all. I want it back.) The pain didn't even register, but it transformed his anger from fire to ice. Turning his back to her, as he always had whenever he wanted to ignore someone and let them know it--
shut her out, don't let her get to you--he lowered his voice to a dangerous growl.
"So why don't you save us some time and tell me
why you're really here?"She took a moment to respond, but when she did, the answer was surprisingly simple (and vastly confusing).
"The fire isn't dead."
"
What?" he hissed impatiently, half turning around to look at her (before he stopped himself with an involuntary shudder, which he quickly suppressed). Why did that woman insist on retaining her apparently untroubled composure in the face of opposition? Perhaps mother and daughter had something in common, after all.
As the lady in question explained further, she did so with a matter-of-factness that was almost childlike, as though she expected her meaning to be clearly understood (or perhaps she just didn't know the right words to convey it).
"The fire--it hasn't died out, not quite. I thought it would have, after everything that's happened, but it's still there. I can feel it."
"What is that supposed to mean?" he demanded in exasperation. Agni knew he'd been forced to put up with enough confusing metaphors from his brother, without this evening's visitor adding to them.
This time, a trace of wistfulness found its way into her voice.
"I mean our fire--what we used to have, before everything changed." Suddenly he knew exactly what she was referring to, and memories of romance and passion from a time long lost flooded sufficatingly through his mind. (
I have to make it stop--I don't care how.)
"Insolent traitor!" snarled the prisoner--what right did she have to bid him remember the connection he had once shared with the one who murdered his father? (
I am the Phoenix King.) "You wouldn't speak so boldly if I were still in power, if I still had my throne and my empire. You wouldn't dare. You--" Whirling around to better storm at the woman, he made the mistake of fixing her with a fierce, golden glare--
--and felt all his meticulously constructed defenses utterly crumble, as he'd known they would if he met her gaze. How quickly he would have chosen anger, hatred, even contempt over what so enslaved him in her eyes. Enmity and derision he could have fought against, but there was no resisting this. Beneath a faint glistening that had not yet reached her voice, those soft, amber-hazel pools drowned him in pity--and yet the way they looked at him was so different from the hastily thrown glances of the prison guards, which were seldom untainted by fear, scorn and hostility.
Completely shattered, the captive of the lady's eyes crumpled slowly to his knees before her, and bowed his head to endure the benevolent and horrifying onslaught that she unleashed on him simply by looking. Now more than ever her penetrating gentleness had cracked open his very core, and he knew--
maybe I've always known, but it's been so long, and I wanted to forget--that merely calling it "sympathy" could never come close to describing it. This was much more powerful, this was...
compassion--or that's what it felt like, judging from his brother's philosophical monologues about altruistic ideals that the younger prince had never really understood. Compassion, brutality--whatever it was, he welcomed it no more than he had the Avatar's mercy. Now, as then, he could only suffer in silence as it washed over him, deep and tender and devastating.
Amidst his internal darkness, the broken Lord at length felt a hand carefully slide under the disheveled black curtain falling in tangled strings around his face, to lay cool, clean fingers against his grimy skin. For a long moment, the lady lingered there, arm outstretched to cradle his cheek on the other side of the bars that divided them in so many ways. Then she was gone with a shadow in the doorway, as swiftly as she had arrived. And yet, before her presence forsook that tower, one more whispered assurance was borne upon the still, damp air to the prisoner's ears.
"I'll come back to you, Ozai."
And the prisoner-Pheonix King-Firelord-Ursa's prince was left alone with the realization, which gave less hope than despair, that he too could feel the lingering embers of their old fire, burning faintly but unmistakably in the depths of his blackened, empty soul.