Work Text:
Halcyon: often used to describe an idyllic time in the past that is remembered as better than today.
- Merriam Webster Dictionary
It has been two days.
Wu wakes with the sun, as he has for as long as memory still holds. He moves a bit slowly – stiff, he is always stiff in the morning these days, and after centuries of relative youth it feels like a betrayal – but by the time he has brewed his morning cup of tea his limbs are once again loose and painless.
He sits down on the front steps of the monastery, a fragile porcelain teacup cradled in his palms and another sitting at his side. He closes his eyes. Basks in the sunlight, in the warmth and quiet of the world on this gentle spring morning.
It is not quite meditation, but for all that Wu was always the more obedient child, he could never empty his mind quite as well as his brother. There was always some thought to contemplate, a new beauty to discover.
The sun rises, climbing into the great blue dome of the sky. It beats down hotter, turning the mellow spring air warm and humid. Wu drinks his tea, and tries not to think about how the teacup at his side is untouched and stone cold.
It has been two days since Morro – his son, that was his son, and how could Wu have been so blind as not to realize it before the boy left? – stormed down the mountain, spiteful words dripping off his tongue in an attempt to mask the hurt that Wu had not realized had been festering.
Wu sighs. After a moment, he reaches for the second cup of tea. It is cold, but tea is tea. It should not be wasted.
He brings the cup to his lips. Stops. Lowers it, slowly, as the ache in his chest twists and sharpens for a moment into something nigh-unbearable.
Wu stands, joints creaking, cradling that second teacup with hands that tremble ever so slightly. A faint breeze trickles over his shoulder, spilling over the mountain and down into the valleys below.
“Master, your beard!”
Cackles of laughter dance in the courtyard like beams of sunlight. The sound warms Wu’s heart. Morro has been so quiet, so reserved, since joining Wu at the monastery.
Who knew that all it took to get him to laugh was one well-timed gust of wind lifting Wu’s beard and dropping it back down into his teacup?
Morro does not laugh like a child, wholeheartedly and with abandon, and there is a slight hunch to his shoulders even as he snickers. But his eyes are bright with mischief as he grins up at Wu.
Wu has a sudden realization, coupled with misgiving.
Morro is a prankster, at heart.
Masters of Wind always are.
“I’m sorry,” Wu murmurs. His reflection stares back at him from the teacup, trembling as the smooth surface of the tea is disturbed by the breeze.
He wishes that his son were here, and that he could tell him the things he hadn’t realized he needed to say.
“I love you. I’m sorry I put so much pressure on you. You don’t need to be the chosen one to be loved,” Wu whispers. A tear slips down his weathered cheek.
“You’re my son. You’re loud and mischievous and you can be a such a pain, and I miss you,” Wu admits.
“I stifled you, and I think I knew better.”
The Wind has never truly been something passed from father to son, mother to daughter. Such a wild, untamed element will not be shackled to one line. The power goes where it wills, seeking out free spirits and those who would claim the sky.
They can feel it in their bones, the Masters of Wind. That wildness, that restlessness. They have never been able to settle in one place, find a status quo and then simply exist in it. They are always moving, always doing, always being. To do otherwise is to stagnate.
And it never goes well, if they – or somebody else – expects them to be something they are not.
“Come back soon,” Wu says, fingers clenched so tightly around the teacup that the fragile porcelain groans in protest.
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes.” The word is a single concussive syllable, not the impossible two-syllable drawl that it usually is when it leaves Morro’s lips.
“Where are you going? Morro, why are you leaving?”
“I’m not the Green Ninja?” Morro scoffs. “That’s bullshit, you don’t get to string me along like this just to change your mind last minute. I am going to prove that I’m the Green Ninja, d’you hear me?”
“How do you even plan to do that?”
“I don’t know!” Morro screams, frustrated. He rarely raises his voice, but when he does, the wind howls with him. “I’ll figure it out!”
“Morro – ”
“Goodbye, Wu,” Morro says coldly, and even as Wu steps forward, reaching out with one hand, he steps off the edge of the cliff, skipping the stairs entirely as he is wont to do in favor of letting the winds carry him down.
Wu stands there, frozen, watching as Morro’s lean figure shrinks and disappears.
Curdling in his gut is the cold and startling realization that for the first time in many, many years, he has made a mistake that cannot be easily undone.
“Come back soon,” Wu pleads the empty air. He hopes, though he knows it is futile, that the wind will somehow carry his words to his son.
He moves, a single jerky motion, and sends the tea in his hands arcing out over the valleys below in golden droplets of grieving nostalgia.
Wu will wait for a long, long time.