Warning: Violence ahead. And possible bad action scene writing.

Without much incident, Zuko and Katara made it to the back door. It should have been sending warning bells all through his head, but there was only the thrum of anticipation. Katara yanked the back of his shirt, shaking her head, and stepped in front. There was no way he'd be able to slip through the door without opening it even more, which would alert whoever was standing inside, but Katara slipped through easily. A second later, there was a thud, and she was holding the door open to him. Inside, the guard was lying unconscious on the floor face down. Zuko took out a precut section of rope, and they hog monkey tied him to an exposed pipe, stuffing an old rag in his mouth. It would take him a while to get himself free, and having one person alive for questioning was always a good strategy.

Inside, it was extremely warm, and the smell of fire whiskey was strong. Maybe they were having some sort of celebration. Zuko hoped they weren't celebrating the impending arrival of a new prisoner. When Katara started ahead of him, he pulled her behind him and fixed her with a firm stare. Though her stealth skills were better on the ground than in the air, he was still better at it than she was.

They were in what used to be the kitchen. It had been converted into a break room for the guards, but the one charged with watching the back door was the only person in there. Hugging the walls, Zuko peeked around the corner. A handful of them were gathered in the hallway, drinking and talking. He scanned for anything that could be used as a distraction, and found a few shot glasses in one of the cabinets.

He stepped up close behind Katara so he could whisper in her ear. "That hallway's full of them. I'll try to lure them back in small groups. Kill them if you have to. I've ordered their termination, anyway." She reached for his hand and gave it a small squeeze; support for what she knew was a hard decision. Zuko would be glad when they could put all of this behind them, even if it did thrill him to be in combat again with his favorite partner.

Taking the glasses, Zuko walked up to the edge of the doorway as Katara slinked back into the shadows. The roof had exposed beams, and Zuko climbed on top of the counter before hauling himself onto the beams. He gave their customary three count, then dropped the first glass.

"What was that?" The chattering in the hallway died down as a few of the guards turned toward the break room.

"I suppose someone should make sure Mikko didn't fall asleep on the job again." Two of the men broke away from the group, and Zuko held up two fingers to Katara to let her know how many were coming.

As they headed toward her, Zuko carefully broke one of the glasses into shards. With gloved hands, he picked up one of the larger pieces, and hoped he'd learned enough from watching Mai with her stilettos and senbon to know where and how to aim small pointy objects. The first thud came from the kitchen, followed quickly by a muffled yelp and a second thud. By the time the second body dropped, Zuko had his target and trajectory, and threw the shard.

"Ah, what the hell!" the man screamed, clutching his forehead. It wasn't quite what Zuko was going for. He was aiming for the eye, but that worked as well. By now, they'd drawn the attention of nearly every member of the Phoenix Brigade that was standing in the hallway, and they were on alert, although some of them were buzzed. Zuko would take a break where he could get one.

When he didn't provide another distraction quick enough, he heard cabinets slamming in the kitchen. While two of the guards struggled with the shard of glass stuck in the forehead of the third, three more walked into the kitchen. Zuko picked out two more shards of glass. The first one hit its mark in the back of the neck of the guard nearest to him, and when the man turned around to see what got him, Zuko managed to get the eye as planned.

He doubled over and howled in pain, and Zuko decided that he should take up knife throwing. More yells and thuds came from the kitchen, and he scooted back along the beams to avoid detection, and to see how Katara was faring just as the guards' attention turned toward the ceiling where someone swore they saw something move. He almost gasped when he turned around, only to be met with a pair of large blue eyes. Katara had climbed onto the roof beams. Five men lay dead on the kitchen floor. She hadn't taken any chances. He pointed the way up ahead, pushing Katara in front and onto a different roof beam, several to the right of where he'd been. The best thing about this group was that they lacked ranged weapons. If they wanted to attack Zuko and Katara while they were in the roof, they'd have to find some other way to do it. Zuko wasn't in the habit of teasing them, though.

Katara's way of picking off the Brigaders was much more effective, but then fire couldn't pierce the way ice did. She was forming more ice daggers, and sending them flying at the guards from different angles to keep them on their toes. If she kept it up like this, the White Lotus Society wouldn't need to come in for the extermination. Zuko took out another length of rope, wrapping it once around each hand, leaving slack in the middle. As the guard walked toward their position, his hand on his weapon, ready to draw, Zuko reached down with the rope and grabbed the man around the neck, much like he'd done when he rescued Aang from Zhao.

The man struggled, but with a sharp twist of the neck, his struggling ended. This drew the attention of the remaining guards to the proper place, and now they were facing a hallway of angry buzzed men. No longer seeing any point in secrecy, they decided to drop down, Katara first, while Zuko dropped the body. She used her ice to slice across the first man's throat to stifle the call he was about to give up. That left four more. Zuko dropped down on top of one, drew his right dao across the second's throat after parrying a blow with his left, while Katara barely dodged a punch from the third before spearing him in the side, and then she exploded the heart of the fourth before he completed the swing that would have lopped Zuko's arm off. This lasted, at the most, ten seconds. For better or worse, they made a good team. These are "bad men," Zuko told himself, relying on his "just do it, don't think about it" system. To try to save them and let them back into society would be killing a thousand others. Sacrifice the few for the greater number.

With the hallway clear, they could check the doors in peace. The first left hand door off the kitchen was a weapons room, and Zuko found a few more daggers and some throwing knives. Katara gave him a quizzical look, but he only smiled and tucked them into his belt. He urged her to take a few, but she was still only in the rough stages of training with Suki. She probably felt more comfortable with her water than with any steel.

The other doors had yielded nothing of interest, and it wasn't until they rounded a corner that the trouble started. It wasn't even from the inside; something was going on outside the compound where the majority of the soldiers were still gathered. An alarm had been raised, shrill and screaming and piercing, and suddenly, there were people everywhere, more people than it seemed that stupid building should have been able to hold.

"What the…?"

They had been caught by guards rounding the corner to answer the call in the courtyard. The ring of steel on steel and the whoosh of fire was muffled by the brick and wood walls, and Zuko took advantage of the momentary confusion by throwing a blast of fire at the man in front of him. Surprised and unready for a firebending attack, the man futilely drew his sword. It only deflected the bare minimum of the blow, and the smell of burning flesh and ash began to fill the hallway, accented by death screams.

For a moment, Zuko was taken back to that battle, the char of skin and fabric, the burning of old buildings and people's homes and that feeling that the end would never come, but he bit the inside of his cheek and gripped his dao tighter, the pain and coppery taste of blood a reminder of the here and now. Katara's back was to his back, and as he blasted the hallway full of fire, she blasted water in the other direction. They weren't the only people looking to infiltrate this prison, and there was no way of knowing if they were friend or foe, or if they were related to the ones who'd been tracking them. They had to be quick. Zuko wouldn't let them be caught.

Seeing as the wooden walls on Zuko's side of the hallway were on fire, Katara threw her water to his side, and when the hall filled with smoke and steam, she filled her waterskins, and kept the excess floating about her. They opened doors at random, hoping to find the cells, and when they did, it was quite obvious—they had bars instead of doors. All the others had been small bedrooms and storage closets, things that were of no use to them.

Several guards rounded the corner, and Zuko took advantage of the throwing knives just as Katara was spearing a few with a javelin of ice.

"What the hell is going on?" Zuko asked, not caring about how loud they were anymore.

"Seems like someone else had the same idea we did." Katara peered through the bars on one of the cells. When she turned to him, her face was grim, and she only shook her head. It wasn't his mother, and it was dead.

Zuko hadn't given much thought to what they would do if they found people alive. He'd hoped to be able to let the White Lotus team deal with it, to wash his hands of the entire ordeal and pretend he'd never been there, but nearly every cell they came upon was empty or only contained dead bodies. No wonder they'd been so lax. There was no one to guard.

But if there was no one to guard, that meant his mother couldn't be there. His mind flitted between being happy, devastated, and furious. Every door, every room yielded nothing, and he began slamming doors harder than necessary. It was too late to wonder if Atem had held that letter so long on purpose, or if she was really just following orders. She'd always seemed trustworthy when he gave her a job, but she never kept up any pretenses about how much her loyalty cost.

Kicking down a door, dao in hand, Zuko yelled in frustration.

"Where is she?" he demanded of the empty room

"I've checked everything on this side. Nothing."

Impulsively, Zuko started setting things on fire. He punched holes in the walls, letting the wood burn, ignoring the pain when the wood cut him and he started bleeding. The fired was pulsing with every breath he took, flaring brighter and brighter the angrier he got. Setting stuff on fire was not making him feel better, but he'd be damned if he let this place continue to stand.

"What are you doing?"

Instead of answering, he walked past her and into an oncoming crowd of the guards, giving voice to a low growl that lodged itself in his chest. They were clearly headed to the front of the house, but were surprised by the two intruders inside.

"You bastards again?"

Zuko charged forward, parrying a slash in the narrow hallway, stabbing sideways and catching the man in the kidney. Hot blood ran down his hands, and he shoved against the dying man with his foot to free his dao. He didn't feel the blade of another knick his bicep, even as he drove the pommel into the man's face, relishing the crunch. Katara was moving beside him, but he didn't stop to see what she was doing. He was punched in the stomach, and doubled over, trying to remember that strength came from breathing, not from anger, and brought the fire up and out of his throat in a blast that would have made Uncle proud. Or scared for him.

Katara jumped away from the flames, flinging herself against the wall. "Watch it!"

The fire was encroaching on them from both sides, so they took a different hallway, one that led them to rows of cells. Indeed, most of them were empty, and they passed these without much thought. Zuko called up the picture of the map Inara showed them, took a guess at where the torture chambers were. He needed to search as much of the house turned prison as possible. Even though it made him sick to think about her in the torture chambers, he needed to know. He tried to fight back the bile and the anger. He needed to know.

They came up behind another group of soldiers, and Zuko grabbed the first one by the hair and used a dao to open him from ear to ear. Blood mixed with smells of smoke and flesh and fire and ash, and still he pushed on, running the other dao through another's middle, ignoring the burning in his lungs. Setting stuff on fire might not have been a good idea in a building with virtually no ventilation, but it was too late to regret that. Katara was ahead of him, putting the dagger to better use than he thought she would. When she bent, her moves were those of a waterbender, but now she resembled Aang more than Suki, light on her feet, and bending her body in ways the bulkier man couldn't. Katara jabbed with the dagger, and when that missed, she bent low, sweeping her leg so that the man was knocked off balance and fell right onto Zuko's swords. She didn't look behind her, only plunging forward to stab the next in the neck.

The hall was too narrow for them to fight side by side, so they were forced to take turns in front. When a guard with a hammer came barreling down the hallway, Katara ducked, nearly catching it in the head. She froze the hammer to the wall, but he surprised her by immediately pulling out a dagger of his own and catching her across her cheek, slicing from ear to nose. Zuko came in low, stabbing on the side of the knee before slipping through his legs and spearing his back. What Zuko didn't see was the punch aimed at the back of his head. He staggered forward, dazed and falling onto hammer man, as another blow caught him in the ribs.

Everyone was starting to cough now. The smoke was quickly filling the building, not being able to escape through the sealed windows. With the air knocked out of him, Zuko was finding it hard to take in another breath. Another blow caught him on the shoulder, and the man dropped behind Zuko when Katara started slashing down the hall with her water, pushing smoke and people back and away from them. Her hands were on him, dragging him to his feet, even though he was still having trouble focusing. Boots pounded down the hallway into the chaos, and Katara tried to push Zuko into the nearest room. He pushed her back and took control of the fire that was raging around them, calling it along the hallways, and it raced toward him. His head was pounding, and he stumbled when he started seeing double. Katara grabbed him as the fire engulfed some of the running soldiers, and drug him into a room before slamming the door closed and jamming it with a chair. She slumped him against the door, then took his face in her hands.

"Can you see me?"

"Yes."

"Are you seeing double?"

He blinked harshly a few times. "Not anymore, I don't think."

She began probing his head. When she pulled her hand back, there was blood, and she wasted no time in gloving her hand with water. In the dim, blue light, Zuko saw just what kind of room they'd entered.

There was blood everywhere. Old dried blood splattered on the walls like an abstract painting. Blood no longer red, but brown, blood seeped into the pores of the walls and the floors. So much of it.

"Holy shit…"

He wanted to stand, but Katara was standing over him, forcing him back down. They struggled against each other until, aggravated, Zuko pushed her to the side, even if it did make his vision swim. Holding up a small flame in his hand, Zuko crawled to the bloody table set up at the far end of the room. He hadn't seen that hair pin for years. It had been his favorite, given to him by his mother for his eighth birthday to hold his crown in place. He'd worn it the day his mother had vanished, but when he went to look for it so he could wear it at Azulon's funeral it had been gone. He'd ordered the servants to help him search through everything in his room, and still it hadn't returned. He'd considered it a good luck charm. He was breathing steam and shaking when he picked it up. It was like his luck vanished with that hair pin.

With his mother.