Title: Agni's Child
Word Count: 415
Summary: Zuko stands at the end of his world.
Challenge: #92: I don't believe in you anymore.
Zuko was weeping (from his good eye, anyway).
The enormity of what he had done was setting in at last, and all he wanted to do was scream and strike out at someone and he wanted his mother there more than anything because if she was there, he would not have just made himself the last of his house.
(stand up, boy, and look your father in the face, and see if you still have the strength to strike--)
(you're a traitor, brother, you realize that you've killed everyone who loved you, everyone you've loved—you think that boy will care for you because you've given him your strength, you deluded blind TRAITOR--)
He shuddered into silence, the echoes of the word ringing in the recesses of his mind, branding him unclean. He wanted to vomit. He had betrayed them, sacrificed his own blood for the ideology of a—of a little boy. Traitors were (used to be) thrown off the mountain under the guarded eyes of Agni's temple for crimes like these, the holy ground bearing witness that the disloyal were contaminated, tainted, imperfections in a perfect design. Oh gods, that was him, dirty-- betrayer-- murderer—
The thoughts tumbled over each other senselessly, blurring with his tears and the ruined palace in front of him still belching black smoke, the only remnant of his confrontation with his--family, the legacy of the greatest ruling house of Agni's chosen people, utterly consumed in the god's chosen element. A thousand years of history vanished the instant he'd burnt his father's heart out, the instant he forgot to control his own heart (life is precious, nephew), and his flame-fingers had leapt free, blazing and feeding into themselves until the room was an inferno far beyond his control.
He'd been willing to die for his blasphemy (really, he simply couldn't force his feet to move, but it amounted to the same thing), but a cool little hand had wrapped around his wrist, an anchor to which his unsteady mind clung frenziedly, and it led him from the stench of death and smoke and blood into the clearer air of dawn.
The hand still rested on his shoulder, offering what comfort it could—the tattoos glowed in his peripheral vision. He took a breath, then two, drinking in every sight and smell and sound and taste of everything that was him, and then—
he breathed out long and slow—
and he turned to face a little boy—