𝑺𝑬𝑬𝑫 𝑶𝑭 𝑰𝑪𝑯𝑶𝑹 •𝒃𝒙𝒃•

13 ~ hiraeth

Actually...he didn't know where to start, so he stopped. He stopped and lowered his head and carefully went through everything, wanting to find a nice starting point, one good enough to kick-start everything that he was about to tell them, but he couldn't. It all...blended together, like a colour palette, scenes and images mixing with each other, creating one incoherent memory after another, as if his own mind refused to give life to them.

"Are you okay?" Aang's voice would ring out, but he wouldn't answer.

He was. He was...okay, but...it was difficult to share his past with others. On other days, he'd refuse to share his past even with himself, refusing to acknowledge that it happened, that he was forced to leave it as perfect as it was, and escape to a foreign land where he was hated.

"Just...wait." He relaxed his shoulders, perched his palms atop his knees and breathed in.

To him, his life began in a single fleeting scene, a fading memory of when he was so, so small, with his tiny hands wrapped around large fingers. Golden eyes stared down at him, the warmth in them meltingly soft, as if honey was about to drip right out of them and down the man's pale, pale cheeks, yet translucent tears went down instead. To think that his first and last memory of that man would be so similar...

So he started there, right at the beginning.

"I...was born in the Fire Nation to a soldier father and a...hiding mother," He didn't stop to take a look at their reactions. He wouldn't stop until he was done, and he was far from done. "For eight years, we lived in a small cottage on the outskirts of the city, far away from the main palace and it's inhabitants. There weren't many other soldiers near us, for our neighbourhood was a fairly poor one, housing hiding refugees and the sick. There was no need for the soldiers to stick around these areas, so we were off the radar. As I've told you before, my mother was from the Northern Water Tribe, but she originated for the Southern Water Tribe."

At that, Katara interrupted him, "Southern...?"

Guren nodded. "She left many years ago, before the two of you were even born, I reckon. She arrived a young girl, perhaps around your age, and she was taken in by Pakku, who, over time, began seeing her as his own daughter," He gave her a strained smile. "Your grandmother wasn't the only woman who ran away from him. I once asked her how she and my father met, and she told me that it was a fated day, that all the forces in the world worked together to make them meet. That was all she ever told me, and I left it at that."

"A Fire Nation soldier and a Waterbender, huh?" Sokka's tone was low, "I can...only imagine how it ended."

So Guren continued, "For reasons that are still unknown to me, we were forced to move after that. The friends I'd had made over the years were all left behind." He lowered his head once again, breaking eye-contact with Katara. "I...made more friends, ones that made my days brighter, ones that warded off my loneliness, yet I was forced to leave them behind as well when my parents' relationship was revealed. General Fong...he told me my father burned my mother through the bone," A poorly restrained laugh slipped past his lips, one that even he couldn't understand. "It was an odd thing to hear."

"Wait...by 'burned through the bone' you mean...?" Sokka trailed off, not daring to finish the question.

Guren tilted his head. "What do you think I mean?"

Sokka averted his eyes.

"But that doesn't explain the flames you can make." Aang made a fair point.

"I can't explain it," So Guren told him the truth. "I don't have a realistic explanation to how it happened. All I know is that my Waterbending was...overwritten by something else, somehow."