legionworld | i'm colder than this home

Entry tags:

i'm colder than this home

Who| Saralegui and anyone else
What| A moment to breathe in all this strangeness, and an odd sight in this day and age.
Where| Saralegui's patch of the Habitat Deck
When| A few days after arrival
Warnings/Notes| Feel free to respond directly, or instead use this log for any other interactions if you want to use the setting for something else! Just specify whether a thread is intended for anyone in particular and whether it's open or closed.

Mixed in with all the rest of the habitat deck, scenic fields and familiar cities and whatnot, was a palace like something straight out of a medieval fantasy. The pale towers stretched up and caught sunlight with decorative patches of gold on the roofs, and great glass windows were set wherever possible.

Saralegui ignored the palace itself in favor of the gardens set at its base.

They were an orderly sort of thing, colorful and well-tended but neatly organized into rectangular sections broken up by smooth pathways. Ornamental trees grew in tidy lines, shading stone benches set at regular intervals. The staff and soldiers couldn't be replicated, of course, but the little white butterflies that were commonplace every spring still flitted about from one patch of flowers to the next. The sight of them sent a little pang through his heart.

This place, though home, had never held any particular warmth for him before. Emptied like this of the busy servants and watchful guards, it felt colder than ever.

In the oddly empty gardens, he stood out like a spotlight, long smooth hair falling like golden silk around his shoulders. And convinced of his solitude, Saralegui took the moment to relax, attention to appearances easing as he sighed heavily and dropped his face into his hands, elbows resting on his knees.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Zuko watched the other teen carefully as he spoke -- the smile tinged with sadness, the attempted pleasantness. He wasn't ready to decide what it all meant but he was at least...aware. Filing away each little gesture, too.

But then he called him decent and Zuko bristled.

When Saralegui had talked about the things that kept a person decent before, he'd been talking about a hypothetical person. This was the first he'd said he personally was a decent person.

"Honest" was true. ("Blunt" was probably more accurate.) In any case, "honest" wasn't really a value judgement. But decent was...

It still felt like too positive a description. He hadn't done enough good yet. He still had so many bad things he'd done to make up for. And that was just...not being terrible. Being a genuinely good person would take even more work -- if he could ever be one at all. Sometimes it felt like he never would be, that he had too many stains on his honor, that he'd made too many mistakes. And sometimes he was even terrified that someday he'd turn out like his father.

Could evil just be in your blood? It was something he thought a lot about.

Even if they did manage to take down his father and Azula, even if he did take the throne, there was a part of him that worried about what he'd do when he actually got it. There was a part of him that had been mulling over the idea that if he did become Firelord, he needed some kind of contingency in case he turned bad, too...

"I'm not a decent person," he said, almost combatively. "You assume too much."

Saralegui was good at dealing with people when he could guess what they would do. And for the most part, he was very good at reading and predicting people. That, however, was definitely not a reaction he would have expected, and so the king is thrown for a moment, pleasant mask slipping.

He frowned, blinking and staring at Zuko like that would explain the bizarre agitation. The other boy had implied he wasn't always so decent, seemed ashamed of it earlier, but then shouldn't the compliment be welcomed? Who didn't like hearing good things about themselves?

The pause stretched on just a little too long for Saralegui's comfort., and so pressing on was inevitable.

Carefully, almost like a person dealing with a spooked animal, he said, "...That's an odd thing to get offended over."

Zuko could be called many things but "predictable" wasn't really one of them. He was very easily agitated and not always the most rational and that meant his moods sometimes vacillated back and force between pleasant and offended and irritable in the blink of an eye.

"You wouldn't think that if you actually knew me."

There was a reason for previous glimpse of shame Saralegui had seen. There was a reason he was trying so hard to be compassionate, a reason he chose honesty over deception.

Zuko didn't like hearing good things about himself because most of them weren't true.

A pause, and the frown only deepened slightly. How to respond to this...?

"To be fair," Saralegui said, still with that careful tone, "That could be said of almost anyone."

(It was certainly true of him.)

He would have said anyone, but. Well. He met Yuuri. And for a terrifying demon king, that boy really was as good and pure as he seemed.

"Maybe it can be said of almost anyone but not the same way it could be said of me."

There was a difference between what he was and people seeming decent on the surface and being petty or less than admirable underneath the veneer of decency. Zuko knew how people were. They were sometimes greedy or selfish or cruel. But there were degrees and the degree to which he'd fallen was more than some average person presenting a fair face and being some selfish cretin underneath.

Especially with what he'd been willing to sit there and let his nation do. His father and his generals planned a genocide and he'd simply sat there, his silence a horrible, tacit approval.

And that was just one small, terrible thing he'd done on a very long list.

"There are degrees. And I've made...mistakes. Bad ones."

Something he would openly admit -- had to openly admit -- even if he didn't want to go into detail.

Edited 2016-01-17 08:31 (UTC)

"That's a little self-obsessed, don't you think?"

Saralegui leaned back on his seat to give Zuko a very flat look, apparently unconvinced. "Perhaps in the opposite way people usually are, but still. You think your mistakes are so much worse than anyone else's that it makes you special somehow?" A beat, and a wry smirk crossed his face. "If I wasn't convinced you were a prince before, I am now."

He'd made some mistakes himself, after all. Some mistakes, and some other things he still wouldn't apologize for having done even knowing how other likely felt about it. And Yuuri still offered blanket forgiveness for all of it, remorse or no. It was hard to imagine there was anything anyone could have done that no one could forgive at this point, and only years of ingrained manners kept Saralegui from rolling his eyes at Zuko's self-pity.

That got under Zuko's skin. He narrowed his eyes. Time for a nice little outburst.

"I don't think I'm special!"

That wasn't what he meant. He just meant that the ways a lot of people weren't as good as they seemed were just petty. They rarely were the kind of people that burned down villages or hired assassins to kill twelve-year-olds.

His fingers curled into fists so tight that his knuckles turned white.

"I just mean..." He didn't know how to articulate what he was thinking. "The way you stop making mistakes is you look at the ones you made and don't forget how bad they were."

The outburst, unsurprisingly, didn't appear to sway Saralegui.

"You don't wallow in self-pity over it either, though." He said it dispassionately, even and smooth with a slight frown. "What's done is done. You learn your lesson and move on. As long as you aren't repeating the same mistakes, what's the use in fixating on how bad it was?"

He'd tried to kill his mother in a fit of rage and nearly gotten the demon kingdom destroyed as a result. That, admittedly, was a pretty huge and embarrassing mistake. And perhaps it was because he'd rather not think about such things more than necessary that he advocated for moving on, but still. Nothing to be done about it, so let it go.

"It's not self-pity. Self-pity means it's about you and not about what you should do."

It wasn't about his feelings. His many, many feelings.

"Some people need ways of keeping themselves in check. I don't always know when I'm -- I don't always know the right thing to do. But worrying about it as much as I do makes it easier to not lose sight of it."

He was sure his uncle would say something about everyone needing to find redemption their own way. Or something. He frowned at the ground.

"If I think about it all and keep things straight here, it's easier to make different choices," he tapped his head and looked up at Saralegui again. "I can't look at myself as a decent person until I earn it. And not losing sight of how far I still have to go helps me keep myself asking questions about what's right."

Maybe that explained it better? Maybe.

Or not.

But not everyone had a clear view of right and wrong. Despite wanting to do right now, he still struggled with knowing what the right thing was sometimes. And avoiding the idea that he was a decent person, that he'd already redeemed himself, meant he questioned his own judgment until he found his way.

Or at least that was what he was telling himself.

"...I think you're making excuses to wallow," Saralegui said, cool and even with that same probing stare.

He let that hang in the air for a moment before very suddenly shrugging, getting to his feet with a casual air and the faintest hint of a smile playing about his mouth.

"But I suppose it's really none of my business how you deal with your past errors."

"It's really not," said Zuko, gritting his teeth slightly. "You barely know anything about me."

He crossed his arms.

"And I don't know why you expect me to take anything you have to say seriously when I barely know anything about you."

Royalty or not, respect had to be earned. He wasn't about to let himself be judged by a stranger. There were plenty of people in the universe Zuko owed an explanation to, but as far as he was concerned, Saralegui wasn't one of them.

Saralegui's eyebrows arched delicately, a perfect expression of polite dissatisfaction and mild confusion at all the hostility. Like he hadn't just been prodding at old wounds.

"You haven't asked anything. It's hardly as if I'm keeping secrets."

"Why are you so curious about other people?"

He wondered if he was like Azula, wanting to know about others to know the right buttons to push, the right places to apply pressure to have leverage.

Or maybe he was just naturally curious.

Maybe he wanted to know about people for possible leverage and manipulation but didn't necessarily want to use it for sinister purposes. Sometimes political hobknobbing was like that. Delicate wording and understanding the atmosphere of a room was an important skill. It had never been Zuko's forte -- hence him questioning a general's plans in his father's war room. (And look where that'd gotten him.) But Uncle was very good at it and he didn't do anything bad with that understanding.

Even if Saralegui lied about his answer, what he chose to say might tell Zuko something about him. Sometimes lies were less a cover up for the truth and more window dressing for it.

Zuko's suspicions weren't exactly wrong. Knowledge about others was useful for all those reasons, leverage and button-pushing, understanding what best appeals to certain people to better deal with them. Whether all that was "sinister" or not depended on one's interpretation of things. It certainly didn't make Saralegui feel sinister. Just better informed.

And besides all that, sometimes people were just interesting. The people here especially, all from entirely different universes with such odd worldviews. Of course he would want to probe deeper, understand more, dig out more intriguing little tidbits until the novelty wore off.

He barely knew Zuko, as things were. It was hard to say what sort of answer would be best for him specifically. So Saralegui fell back on wide-eyes earnestness, a perplexed little frown on his face.

"How else do you expect to get to know others?"

Zuko opened his mouth and closed it again, and for just a moment, he looked cagey and confused. The truth was he didn't really know how most normal social situations went. He didn't know how people usually handled meeting each other.

He'd grown up somewhat sheltered in the palace with his playmates (Mai and Ty Lee) basically being chosen for him and his sister from the aristocracy. And when you were at that young of an age you didn't take time to get to know someone. All you needed was "Do you want to play fire frogs?" and you were friends.

Then when he was thirteen he'd been exiled and and spent three years without making new friends. He'd bypassed the entire process of a child turning into a teen and mastering more complex social situations entirely. It'd just been him and his Uncle and a bunch of grizzled soldiers on a ship, and any interactions he'd had outside of that had usually been hostile and involved threats or, well, burning down villages.

If he had ever known how normal social interaction and meeting people worked, he'd almost certainly forgotten it. Things like his tense talk with Song and awkward date with Jun had made that abundantly clear. Things like his disastrous first attempt to get Aang and his friends to accept him had made it even more clear.

"I'm not very good at talking to people," Zuko admitted, crossing his arms. It seemed less like he was crossing them to show off an attitude and more like he was protecting himself.

Not that he realized it. It was an unconscious gesture. Then his body language grew more awkward still as he tried to do the very small talk they were talking about.

"What's it like where you're from?" he asked, looking away from Saralegui and up at the castle walls. "I mean...besides this palace. You know. Outside it."

Edited 2016-02-03 06:53 (UTC)

Obviously, was the unspoken answer to that little explanation. And unspoken, of course, because Saralegui was nice like that.

(It didn't need to be said out loud anyway. The slight curve of his lips said it all.)

"My country, or my world?" Satisfied with this social upper hand, Saralegui let his smile go a bit gentler, nothing but friendly teasing. "The weather or the people or the political state of things? You really need to be more specific."

Now Zuko was frustrated again. Why was this so hard?

He threw his hands up in the air.

"Both! Either! Just...say something that isn't asking me questions."

What part of it all he chose to talk about would be telling, wouldn't it? Did he care about the people of his nation? Its culture and history? Its place in the world?

Zuko crossed his arms again. "I'm interested in all of it."

He genuinely was. It was strange finding out about these other worlds -- other ways things could be. His world had been entrenched in a war for a hundred years, his nation had shamed itself with a hundred years of travesties. It was reassuring to find out there were worlds that weren't that way -- and also that there were other worlds that were.

Apparently in this universe, from what he'd been told so far, there had been many wars between many nations -- and even many worlds -- and it had all resolved into...something that was an attempt to be better. He wanted to know that it was possible in more than one place, that other worlds had dragged themselves out of that kind of darkness and imbalance.

"...You're shy." Saralegui said it like it was a fresh revelation, with a delighted grin. "Fine, fine. No more questions for you."

Mildly disappointing, actually. He was interested too, after all, and he still had plenty he wanted to ask about. But such things could come later, he supposed.

The young king frowned thoughtfully, for a few moments just staring out over the gardens while he chose. Between the vast number of directions he could take that question and the different effects choosing any one of them could have on his image here, there was a great deal to consider in the few moments he could reasonably decide before appearing too calculating.

"...We were very close to achieving some real peace, I think." It's a good choice, Saralegui thinks. A nice direction to take things, and something he's even genuinely proud of. "Before I woke up here, anyway. A few more months, and I think we would have done it. Something solid and lasting."

"I'm not shy!" Zuko insisted defensively. "Like I said, I'm not very good at talking to people."

Now he was in a full sulk, arms crossed, shoulders hunched. He hated having his awkwardness pointed out. But the rest of what Saralegui said had gotten to him so he couldn't stay mad long.

"Was your world at war?" he asked. "Or was there just tension between the nations there?"

Even the latter was something miserable, always having to dance around conflict. Not as bad as open war, but still not the peace and balance that should exist between nations.

Edited 2016-02-06 09:50 (UTC)

"It used to be. And there were always warmongers pushing to return to it. No open fighting, but we'd come very close a few times."

Like Lanzhil's naval attack. Or his attempt at it, anyway, which Yuuri had conveniently put a stop to (with a bit of persuasion from Saralegui). Only luck and quick thinking had prevented things from returning to open war.

"But my friend ruled over almost half the world -- half of the part that had always been involved in the fighting, anyway -- and I was very close to having control over all of the other half. Between us, we could have put a stop to all the fighting for at least the rest of our lives, if not for good."

A beat, and Saralegui smirked in the most self-deprecating way, shrugging almost pitifully.

"But I'm stuck here, now."

Zuko looked thoughtful at that.

"They said that they think we'll go back to when we left. When they manage to free us and send us home."

His eyebrows creased into a look that was more than concern. Genuine fear made his brows knit up and it wasn't fear for himself. It was fear for his world and his nation and the friends he'd left behind.

If he didn't go back to when he left, that meant Katara would have to face his sister alone. That meant his friends would be short another one of their number because of spirit world nonsense (because this had to be spirits, right?).

"Provided they're even telling the truth."

It was possible they were being lied to, after all.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

i'm colder than this home

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject