Disclaimer: I make no claim on the characters of Avatar: The Last Airbender. They belong solely to their creators, and I garner no profit from their usage.
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In his own warped sense of naïvety, he never expected history to repeat itself.
The rather amoral tendency of the second-born to engage in patricide.
Though he had been informed beforehand of the Solar Eclipse, the prospect of his death during that time had amounted to little more than a fleeting afterthought: a pipedream conjured up by his child adversaries amidst the throes of their futile mission.
Surely, no one within his own nation would have the audacity; the gumption; the iniquity to take him down in his most glaring moment of vulnerability.
Unthinkable.
Unfathomable.
But as cool steel, critical and unapologetic in its sense of precision, wedged itself into his neck to puncture a vital artery, the full weight of reality came crashing down upon him.
Also hindered by the fire-snuffing effects of the abominable eclipse, the wielder of the offending object – his once "precious" daughter! – inched into view from her strategic placement behind him, the upward wrenching of her wrist freeing the embedded knife from its confines in a most satisfying spray of blood.
He never lifted a hand in retaliation. This was, after all, his favored child. For fourteen years, the source of his greatest pride; the human representation of perfection at its finest... now morphed into his personal judge, jury, and executioner.
"I'm just repeating history, Father. You understand..."
As the remnants of the precious life-sustaining liquid drained from the gaping hole in his neck, the once-proud Fire Lord sank to his knees, any temptation to scream overruled by the more pressing desire to choke out his final words: "Why, Azula? Why...?"
He would be met with no verbal response: simply, and more strikingly, the feral grin reserved for her triumph over her most hated enemies.
Through rapidly blurring vision, he could discern a clawed hand swooping toward the crown of his head, greedy fingers ( bathed in blood, no less ) latching around the base of the diadem that had nestled in his topknot for years – all for naught, all for naught – and yanking with a cruelty unrestrained; unabashed in its hunger for this object of power. The pain that was normally associated with hair being torn from its roots no longer registered as his eyelids grew unbearably heavy, and he gave in to a welcoming sleep.
The instrument of murder was then allowed to clamor carelessly to the floor, its wielder discarding it in a shameless display of fickleness. Now that her task was complete, she had no use for such trivialities as a weapon – no loyalty to that which granted her a long-sought dream.
Tools: those forged from steel, or borne of human flesh, were to be tossed away once they outlived their usefulness, mattering only in the realm of here-'n-now.
In what was perhaps the greatest sense of irony, only the first word in the blade's inscription – the "Never" in "Never Give Up Without A Fight" – had been covered by the crimson stain that now garnished its tip.
The following morning, the knife's true owner would be framed for the heinous double-charge of regicide and patricide: punishable by death without honor.