#IM A DAY LATE BUT I DONT SEE YOU CUTTING DNA PLASMIDS OKAY

[ohmygodtheywereparabatai]

Your Weekly Drabble! - Alpha Tauri

it’s me. i’m ambitious

Continuing directly from where we left off last week, i.e. Zhao hits the wrong fish and fucks up the whole planet.

This leaves Yue in the position of a less than gentle, loving lady who rules the skies with lunar goodness.....

- - -

He kneels in a savaged Agna Qel’a - when he prays, gods are not the ones who answer.

The flow of the oasis was stoppered years ago; if he observed the drawn rise and fall of his lashes, centuries of life on a green, prosperous earth seemed to slip out from underneath. After that scarlet night, he was omniscient long enough to witness the catastrophe of his own failure - yet every drop of Zhao was pitifully mortal, and to watch the heavens unfurl was the only power he had left.

Except this. To pray.

He hears groaning, a scraping that sounds deceptively ice-like... an all-too familiar hope that had been stamped out of the hardiest. Even the Avatar’s light dwindled. There was no water. Only fire - fire was life, it was energy, it sustained them... but without its pair, it burned them away as it kept them alive.

Alive.

Wearily, his fingers - the tips flaked with ash, nerves unraveling - loosen their clasp, sinking into his lap. Zhao turns.

Alive.

His mouth is forming words that he won’t comprehend. The world is a dulled edge, but she stands in sharp relief. People were often like the dead skin they left behind - piece for piece scattered where they fled, souls eroded into oblivion by an incongruous flame.

“You’re still alive?”

Zhao himself is a waning man, branded sevenfold for his treachery, among them anklets welded to his feet. It was for the ancient beasts and spirits that tore out of the drained sea floor to hunt him, to trail his sound. Her scleras are dark, with flaring twin points. Even from a distance, a raw sensation burrows into his gut that the moon hungered. Her partner is - was - the ocean... Zhao had as good as severed her from her mortality, humanity, or both.

The spirit’s - or a girl still, unable to die - clothes hang in rags, whisper on the dry ground. There was a ravenous note to her rasp, and it pushed Zhao to his feet, made him want to uproot the sword he’d dug into the grass. Or at the very least, run.

“Slayer...” His prayers feel less answered than they are judged. The girl herself seems elongated, tall and thin, skin greyed, features pitting like dunes.

“I watched my people fight to stay above the water... I watched them sink beneath the tide.”

Her clothes whisper because they hover. Their shadows are sweeping strokes, crooked lines on hot rock and dust. Zhao’s hands are too weak to even grasp the weapon’s hilt - or it’s her, her pulling the earth down like the weight of sorrow - and he abandons the effort when the spirit lunges.

Ducking around the first formation he sees that can bury his figure, he waits before scrambling to the next. The landscape resembles broken teeth. Chimes jangle from Zhao’s feet - his limp is profound - the spirits are hungry, they’re dying out, and she didn’t seem the latter as much as the former. Why?

The ocean was barren. Nothing could reunite her with her cohort... no one...

“I watched them...”

His feet disturbs the sand, the bells clinking softly.

“... vanish. My city turned from ice into glass. It shattered, descended to the depths.”

A fist launches right through the stone, taking apart a hole where her line of sight lowers. The pupils snap to him. Zhao jolts.

“I roamed the surface, waiting.” Her hair is live and writhing, every limb rooted to her outstretched, beckoning come, come. He isn’t inclined to obey.

The chase is short-lived. Firebenders might linger, but only as long as a dim fate willed it. Around and around they fled, the most punished nation of the four; Zhao tripped, the ends of his skin that had crawled over fused metal ripping like a scab, blood littering the footpath behind him. He’s too late to jam his teeth into his tongue, too late to palm his chin and surrender to the quiet - trembling within a hot nausea that beats in his temples, counting on the lucky stars that hadn’t yet winked out of existence.

“Waiting... waiting...”

And still, she is the moon, full and whole and alone, and instead of a sky miles above and away from him, she lands at his broken feet.

... Maybe he prayed for it to end. Maybe fate took its meaning into bitter hands. Hers are braced in the light, tipped in claws. Face streaked in misery or hesitance, like an open chink, or an impervious faith that surpassed even the lone airbender’s. And who was left in the world that could believe in him?

“... for you.”

Yue struck out.

#IM A DAY LATE BUT I DONT SEE YOU CUTTING DNA PLASMIDS OKAY?? #zhaozai palooza 2021 #ray’s friday ficlets #sailor moon ☯️ #zhayu #dark!zhayu hehe fish got fried to a crisp #fish got laced with cyanide #fish got SNATCHED