Title: The Greater Good
Author: overlithe
Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender
Summary: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works… Near the end of his life, Sozin reflects on his best laid plans.
Characters/Pairings: Sozin, Roku (sort of); very mild Roku/Sozin
Prompt: avatar_500 prompt 15. Defeat; fanfic100 prompt 003. Ends
Word Count: 500
Rating: T
Warnings: There's nothing above a T rating, but the subject matter is fairly dark.
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and concepts created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, and owned by Nickelodeon and various other corporations/people. I'm not making any money and do not intend any copyright or trademark infringement. There are no direct quotes from anything, but a lot of the inspiration comes from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel Watchmen.
Author's Note: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and I've always found people who do bad things for (what they think are) good reasons to be way more interesting than Card-Carrying Villains. Many thanks to muffinbitch for her input on this story.
The Greater Good
When he dreamed, the world glittered with cities of glass and steel, vast plazas built from white stone, roofs tipped with gold.
When he was awake there was a war going on at his right hand. He knew—or supposed, at any rate—that it was much too distant for him to sense it, but still he was sure he could smell burnt flesh and blood on cold steel. So he preferred his dreaming hours, for all that he had thought over and over that he'd accept the burden of what he had done uncomplainingly.
'So I turned out to be a hypocrite after all, old friend,' he said to the shadow watching from the corner. 'I am sure you find it amusing.'
Later, when he woke from another tight sleep, he was thirteen for a second, comforting Roku through a fever dream. Then he blinked, asked for paper and a brush again.
'You know why I did it, don't you?' he said when they were alone. The shadow was silent. 'You of all people should understand. You said you'd kill me for the greater good.' His chuckle turned into a cough and his brush slipped over the paper. 'And what greatest good is there than a world united and at peace? What wasn't worth sacrificing for that? Unnecessary deaths, perhaps, but who can truly judge that?' He paused. 'No, you saw the wealth and beauty of our cities, the happiness of our people. One decisive strike and all nations would surrender. To a better world.
'A world where actions like mine would be no longer necessary and someone like the Avatar would no longer have a place.'
He looked down at the paper, where characters had appeared almost without him noticing, spiderfly-lines of ink. Remorse.
Regret.
'But that's all a lie, isn't it?' he said, not sure if he was repeating a conversation he did not recall having. 'All of us. Me. You. There is no greater good. No greater purpose. War is its own meaning, its own purpose. Forever.' He thought of his dream cities again, buried under ash in a blank world where the only meaning was written in fire and blood. 'There's no balance. No fate. No justice.
Just us.'
He shook his head, alone in a stuffy room, and white fire burst through the paper, crumbled it to ashes. He was fourteen, holding Roku's hand, telling him they would be friends together forever. He was standing on a volcano slope, watching Roku stretch his hand towards him, feeling nothing but the air's searing heat. He was sixteen, reaching out to Roku's hand to stop him from falling, but it was too late, it had always been too late, a whole blasted lifetime too late.
An age of illumination upon the world, he thought, memory full of a comet's radiance.
Then he coughed, and laughed, and laughed again, and hoped that death, when he let it come, would not be without a sense of irony.
++The End++
Notes: (This is just to give the fic some context and background, you can safely skip it if you're not interested in meta.) Sozin's genocide of the Air Nomads is pretty much the worst action that we know of in the canon (other people tried worse things, but they didn't succeed, so that's neither here nor there) but even the first time I watched The Avatar and the Fire Lord, he struck me as (deliberately) being a tad Strawman Has a Point in his dispute with Roku (I do read Sozin as being genuinely an Utopia Justifies the Means sort of character). Since interpretations of any work are by definition personal, I am sure that plenty of people have a different reading, but to me, that whole plotline struck me as being best understood in light of something a character said in Babylon 5: "Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side… and the truth." This fic is an attempt to show a (very short) glimpse of Sozin's side of the story—and yes, I am sure that, from his point of view, Roku's actions come across as a mix of hypocritical and incomprehensible: his objection to Sozin's plan at the wedding is pretty vague (and, from Sozin's perspective, it probably boils down to "Your plan is wrong because I'M THE AVATAR SO SHUT UP") and when Roku finds out that Sozin started it 35 minutes ago, his handling of the situation is just about the worst possible one: he makes it clear that he's willing to kill Sozin for the greater good… as a reaction to someone whose whole argument is that… it's all right to do bad things for the greater good. Yes, I was literally facepalming throughout that part of the episode (and I say this as someone who really likes Roku, though perhaps I should phrase that as "I say this because I really like Roku", since I clearly like characters because of their flaws, not despite them! :)).
Tl;dr, from Sozin's point of view that whole mess went down like this: Sozin: Hey, I'm going to drive the zamboni as fast as I can down that sixty-degree slope covered in ice, wanna come? Roku: HDU, only the Avatar gets to drive the zamboni down the slippery slope! (Well, his point of view with my opinion of the whole "for the greater good" argument mixed in, though my favourite way to express my opinion of Sozin's plan is definitely 'So your plan is 1. Kill millions 2. ? 3. UTOPIA. Yes, I see no weak points here at all. There's no possible way this could go wrong. Especially the bit where you conjure up the war genie from its bottle. It's always so easy to stuff it back inside. I'm sure you won't end up regretting any of this. Here's your motivational poster.' (And, again, I am foiled by ffnet's inability to add links, but go to Google Images and search for "mistakes demotivational poster". Seriously, you won't regret it. ;))