ATLA/LOK Pro-Bending Competition, "Finals" Round: The Butterfly Effect (Alternate Choice Playing Out)
Bonus Prompts: destructive earthquake, use of element - fire
Word Count: 1184
This round focuses on different effects of the same key event (our team's key event was Aang NOT encountering the Lion Turtle), so our pieces are all related, despite the fact that they are not actual chapters of a story, so to say.
The Gray Beach by Writer1001 (s/12797606 - can be c/p'd into the URL)
Death Is Certain, its Hour Unknown by DragonMaster65 (s/12797618 - can be c/p'd into the URL)
Thank you to my wonderful teammates this season! It's been a great ride!
ours is a righteous fury (which echoes hollow through the years)
The elements crashed furiously - push and pull between man and boy.
Below Aang, the forests burned a blinding orange, choking the air with smoke (and with urgency). Scorching flames swooped in a merciless arch to meet the Avatar's rising flood, erupting in a blast of steam that pricked hotly on his skin. Flinging his arms out in a willful slash, Aang split the steam apart to reveal Ozai's steadied stance, backlit by destruction, and he felt his stomach lurch. Ozai was calling himself 'The Phoenix King' now, casting the world into flames and pulling it out again, brushing off the ash and calling it reborn.
(The world was dying, but as far as Aang could tell, he didn't really think 'rebirth' was the route Ozai's plan was taking.)
A punch of fire hurtled forth, and Aang launched upward in a graceful flip, grazed by the attack's warmth even as he landed on a single foot with all the poise of a flamingo-duck. He could see the crazed determination in his opponent's eyes, the piercing gaze of a man who believed his 'justice' was just - and in that molten smirk, he saw an immovable force.
Curling his fingers in front of his chest and tugging outward in a prying motion, Aang tore the earth out from under Ozai, shocking the ground with shuddering tremors as Aang bounced away from the quake. ("I can't let you hurt people anymore!" he shouted into the burst of debris.) Stone split and slid down toward the tumbling man, but all at once Ozai's form stiffened to a pillar, and two burning blasts propelled the man upward again to hover like some bird of prey set aflame.
Buzzing at the edge of his vision, something distant caught Aang's attention, and when he turned to look, he could see the approach of the Fire Nation air force, some which were steered a little more expertly than others, and a complicated mix of relief and terror clenched in Aang's chest as he realized the one with a speck of a crew member hanging out the side with a frantic wave must be the craft his friends commandeered.
(They had made it, they had taken control, they were still safe-
Ozai's line of vision followed his own, locking on the erratic airship.
-but maybe not for long.)
Ozai reared back to shoot it down in some needless blaze of glory, and inside Aang swelled a sudden horror as his friends' faces flashed through his mind in a terrible loop. Against his skull, the merciless advice of his lives past crashed unrelentingly as he clenched his eyes shut.
'You must be decisive.'
'Only justice will bring peace.'
'You must actively shape your own destiny.'
'Sacrifice your own spiritual needs, and do whatever it takes to save the world.'
Whatever it takes-
"I can't!" Aang screamed miserably, eyes unclenching in time to see a ball of fire swelling around Ozai's fist, gaze fixed on the erratic ship, rather than Aang himself.
"Leave them out of it, Ozai! This is between us!" Aang shouted firmly.
The Phoenix King's smirk only flickered further.
Anger pooled as Aang's tattoos burned white.
Whatever it takes-
(a surge of untempered power, uncounted lives ribboning back to the birth of bending, fire burning across his skin and water in his blood and stones in his fists and air whooshing in his chest - whirling whipping dodging jumping hurling shouting - his friends' faces in laughter, his friends' faces in panic - fear, anger, arms tugging and pulling and pushing raw power out from his small body -
and then
nothing)
The energy slipped out of Aang like air from his lungs, and he collapsed to his knees beside Ozai's still form, now splayed on the broken earth.
'Only justice will bring peace,' Avatar Kyoshi had said to him.
Aang felt no peace.
Some time had passed before the others reached him, dropping down from their hijacked craft to smother him with celebrations, but Aang felt like retching. Toph was the first to notice - maybe that feeling of micro-retching was more telling than he thought - and when she told them to "Back off of Twinkletoes, give him some room," Aang couldn't decide if the staring was better or worse.
'Worse' elevated to its own plane when at last they regrouped in the Fire Nation Capital, met with Katara's warm smile of relief and Zuko - Zuko wrapped and recovering from a shot of lightning to the chest.
"We subdued Azula - she won't be a problem anymore," Katara was saying, "All of us - we really did it."
Beside her, Zuko's eyes were keen, though Aang couldn't quite meet them. "What happened with my father?" he asked searchingly.
If Aang had been looking behind himself, he might have seen Suki and Sokka's panicked headshakes, in contrast to the subdued back and forth of his own, but his eyes were fixed to the cobblestone path.
Katara covered her mouth in horror. "He got away…?"
The panicked headshaking intensified as Aang's face contorted.
"He didn't," Zuko and Katara concluded in unison. "Aang-" Katara continued, reaching out a hand to rest on his shoulder. "Aang, you did the right thing. He was destroying everything."
"He needed to be stopped," Zuko agreed, though there was a certain tightness to his tone, and when Aang forced his own eyes up, he saw that Zuko's had fallen in turn.
"Yeah, we stopped the bad guys! It's a good thing!" Sokka said with a certain overdone enthusiasm as he flung one arm around his sister's shoulders and the other around Aang's. "Here we all are, still together in the end. That's really something, you've got to admit!"
Aang nodded, a storm still clouding in his eyes. "It's something…"
The world had congratulated Avatar's Aang's glorious victory, striking down the evil Fire-Lord-Turned-Phoenix-King, but even as the medal had been thrust upon him that day, even with the multitude of sincere thanks he had been gifted through the years to follow, he felt an empty despair when he thought of Ozai's lifeless eyes before him.
Every life was meaningful-
He'd sworn an oath to protect the sanctity of life-
(There must have been another way-)
Yet he'd slain his friend's father, however awful that father had been. Zuko had never thrown blame at him, had never called him on his failure to uphold the spiritual principles of the airbending nation, but there was a strange edge to the lines of Zuko's face when the subject was thoughtlessly brought up by those who knew no better - an unresolved tension, pulled taught.
Surrounded by the solitude of the Southern Air Temple, perched alone atop a roof in meditation, Aang faced no wounded eyes except for his own, surrounded by the ghosts that the Fire Nation had taken away from him. (How long had it been since last he'd seen them all? Days, weeks, months, years crashed together like ripples against a bank.)
'Only justice will bring peace,' Avatar Kyoshi had said to him.
Peace for the world, maybe.