Copper - A Short Yueko piece
A/N: Nebulous Canon, that is to say... Uh... don't take it inside any particular point in the original canon ATLA. Youth age.
She had skin like copper.
Malleable.
Soft.
It wasn’t as precious as the other metals but it was abundant and still had worth. Zuko loved feeling it at the tips of his fingers like a man panning for a nugget of gold or an artisan holding the fine stone of jade. Perhaps, thought Zuko, that this beautiful woman did have precious stones inside of her just because of her eyes which looked liked the most virgin and pure of lapis stones. Lapis Lazuli.
His mother had a necklace with such stones which she had to throw out. The color blue was weakness, said dear grandfather. The imperial red of rubies and fire was something of true strength and it was the only thing allowed for a consort of the Fire Nation.
Zuko liked the color blue. A perfect blue especially. He liked melancholy and the memory of younger days. He liked it when the sun hadn’t yet set and there was a hazy and otherworldly blue that hung around the atmosphere apart from just that tiny strip of red across the horizon.
He wanted to be that red. That tiny strip upon the blue.
Yue smiled that bright smile as white and bright as the crescent moon, like the moon that sat above the sunset, and with her blue she was the sunset. Zuko was that red strip upon the horizon that sits just at the cusp of being there and disappearing.
"Do you like my hair, my prince?"
"I told you to just call me Zuko."
Zuko grumbled as he twirled Yue's white locks between his fingers. Clouds. All of them clouds that streaked across the sky in cirrus fashion and nimbus presence.
"You have such wonderful hair, princess."
"And you as well.... Zuko."
A smile appeared on the prince's face that he fought to hide by turning away and giving out a bellowing clearing of throat from deep within his chest. Such motions made the small horsetail atop his bald head shift serpentine and only tempted Yue to reach out and brush it with the palm of her hand. Instrumental fingers. The types that played erhu. Soft gentle things that sent tingles down his neck and filled him with youthful infatuation.
There was a silence after Zuko's boyish laughs. Yue paused and gave out a sigh as she saw the turtleducks in the pond with great sadness in her crystalline eyes. Yea, the turtleducks seemed to swim in those blues, those perfect blues that Zuko now saw become saturated with tears.
He didn't like the imperfect. He wasn't supposed to. His father had instilled in him that anything less than perfect was an abject failure and to be marked and avoided... just look at him. Yet as much as Zuko knew to hate this imperfection he just couldn't.
"I am scared. I was brought here to be betrothed to you for the peace between my tribe and your nation but I think your father doesn't like me. I think he hates me. I think he likes it that he is making you marry a person he hates."
Zuko paused and looked at Yue's blues before letting out a sigh and looking up a the Fire Nation's blues up in the sky.
"I feel like I am like copper to him, Zuko. Worthless. Weak. I think he wants to give you me because he hates you."
That wasn't true. Well part of it was.
It was true that Yue was copper. That was her color and softness. She may not have appeared to be the most noble of metals but she had jewels and precious stones all around her. Not rubies. Not blood red gems or fire red crystals.
A perfect blue. Not worthless nor weak. Perfect for Zuko, who saw her as noble as the night sky.
"You are copper and you are lapis. You are even sapphires, Yue. Crystals of ice and happy things. You are everything my father hates but everything I can come to love, and that's what matters."
Yue smiled.
Pearl teeth and shining eyes.
A perfect blue inside a noble copper.
