400 word drabble: Asunder

[attackfish]

Written for avatar_500 prompt #7, Neglect.

Summary: When wars end, there's always someone lost in the shuffle.

Asunder

Wangji’s mother is Earth. Her mama is strong and steady, and steadfast as stone.

Wangji’s brothers and sisters are Earth. They have green eyes, and slow tempers, and they grew up with dirt on their hands.

Wangji’s stepfather is Earth. He has big hands and wide shoulders that Wangji and all of her siblings rode around on in turn.

Wangji threw sparks around her crib as a baby. When he was feeling cruel, her big brother Keqin would tell her all about how that made her mother cry, and rage, about how Wangji wasn’t her stepfather’s but that Fire soldier who had-

Everybody was so happy when the war ended and the Fire Nation soldiers left and the Earth Kingdom ones came back. Wangji too. She’s not happy anymore.

When they came back, they put Wangji in a wagon. They wouldn’t let her family come, so her mama, and papa, and all her brothers and sisters followed along side and held her hands until the soldiers drove them away. There were other mothers fathers, stepfathers, stepmothers, brothers, and sisters following too, for the other kids, until the soldiers drove them away.

When they put her on the wagon, she was wearing green, a jeogori and chima her mama sewed her. They made her change into something red, but she didn’t own anything red. She still doesn’t. The scratchy thing they gave her is the brown color of dry blood.

She’s the oldest kid in the cart from her town; they keep handing her the babies, but she’s the baby of her family, and she’s never been near any other kind of baby before. But the Fire Nation colonists in the cart with them won’t have anything to do with them; they say the kids are Earth Kingdom, and they won’t admit they lost the war, and Haizi’s crying and she can’t do anything.

She’s thirteen. Everybody says that’s the same age as the Avatar. She hates him.

Tomorrow she’s going to get on a big metal ship, and everything left of what she knows will be gone.

She doesn’t think anyone in the Fire Nation will want anything to do with them any more than the Fire Nation colonists do.

There won’t be anyone waiting for her.

She doesn’t bend anymore. It aches and aches, and calls to her, but she won’t bend like they bend.

Wangji knows she’s Earth.

Comments

[deathjunke.livejournal.com]

You, you made this appear!*points to bunneh of plot* with your awesome drabble! With the awesome description of how everyone else was like earth and the amazing emotion and all the things that are left unsaid and the angst.... its so angsty i can taste it! not to mention your overall general awesome.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oh noes, it got loose! I'll help you chorale it so it never bothers you again!

And of course, we all know that if Aang and Zuko knew what was going on, those kids would be back with their families. If there's one thing I like to write, it's angst. Big, fat, ANGST.

[deathjunke.livejournal.com]

i dont know about that... I'm a pretty damn good stick shaker, if i do say so myself.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

lol

[danatheleseus.livejournal.com]

This is a really good shortfic. Perfect.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I love avatar_500, because it gives me a reason to stretch those shortfic muscles.

[beboots.livejournal.com]

Nice! Creepy, though, just rounding up all of the fire babies and separating them from their families... I like that the Fire Nation colonials see the babies as Earth, despite their ancestry. I like the emphasis on the Earth Kingdom, like in the last line. Very good.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

My poor little Wangji. I have this horrible habit of making new OCs just to torture them. I was a little worried as to how this would come out, being mostly exposition and about an OC. I'm a fandom sinner.