Genre: Supernatural

Rating: K plus

Summary: Something else happens during Sozin's Comet, and Ozai's self-appointed title turns out to be quite fitting.

Ozai was cold.

It was ridiculous - he was a firebender, one of the best, and Sozin's Comet fueled his flames to incredible proportions. He should be perfectly warm. He should be hot, even. But he wasn't - his inner fire flared to compensate for the mysterious cold that had seeped into him, but it wasn't enough. Like his natural body temperature had shot up to ridiculous heights and his body couldn't get there fast enough.

He ducked behind a rpck pillar to avoid the Avatar's fire blast and found himself shivering uncontrollably. A blue fire, bluer even than Azula's, lit in his palm, and he held it close, trying desperately to warm up before his opponent found him and his sudden weakness. The flames licked his skin, but there was no pain. He was still so cold. How did he get so cold?

"FIRE LORD OZAI!" the child bellowed in a hundred voices. "WHERE ARE YOU?"

Yea, he didn't feel like answering that.

Were his fingers turning blue? And not just from the blue fire, either. He pushed more into the fire, letting the flames dance over his frozen fingertips and across his legs. His teeth were clacking from the shivering. He was almost entirely on fire now, desperate for warmth, trying to ignore the way his skin was burning painlessly, the way his inner fire leapt inside his chest to burn him from inside the way his own flames were burning him from the outside.

Wait. He was burning himself alive. Shouldn't he be panicking? Shouldn't he be in pain? But this felt...right, somehow. Like he was supposed to do this.

He looked at his hands. His fingers were no longer blue, but they were slowly turning to gray ash and falling away. He touched his chest with the bare bone of his finger and more ash began to fall away from his burning chest. Even his bones were slowly turning to ash underneath the blue flames.

He'd never felt so utterly calm.

The Avatar was still yelling for him, but he blocked it out and closed his eyes, basking in the mindless pleasure of fire, feeling his body crumble to ash. It felt like death, and yet it didn't - something else was waiting for him on the other side of it. He was sure of it.

Even if there wasn't, he'd come to this battlefield to die a martyr, and it was that thought that comforted him as the last of his thoughts fell away.

Aang found Ozai just as he crumbled entirely to ash.

The sight shocked him out of the Avatar state, made him fall to the ground a couple meters below. Was - was he dead? Was his opponent gone? Had he set him on fire for real, killed him for real? His throat closed up and he fell to his knees, trying desperately to breathe, to ward off the sudden, terrible nausea that attacked him. The pile of ash that had been the Fire Lord - just ash, not even any bones - lay there mockingly, accusingly, and Aang's vision of it warped with the tears in his eyes.

He'd just...killed him. On accident, with all the past Avatars egging him on inside his head, but that wasn't an excuse.

...had the pile just moved?

He scrubbed away his tears and looked closer at it. It was real-a little bit of the ash, right in the middle, shifted from side to side. Aang plunged his hands into the grey and found something almost immediately, something soft and small, and when he brought it out...

A chick. A tiny bird chick, covered in soft, shimmery orange down, and looking very disoriented.

It was an insane idea, but..."Fire Lord Ozai?"

Cheep. It looked like an affirmation.

"You're..." Aang took a deep breath. "You're a phoenix. For real." He found himself laughing, relief and confusion splashing together to create the crazy sound bubbling up inside him. How would he explain this to Sokka and Katara and Toph? How would he explain this to Zuko?

Well. Maybe he could figure all that out later, he decided, as he turned his face up and started looking for his friends.

I KNOW THIS IS LATE, OK? I FORGOT AND I HAD TO DO THIS OVER THREE HOURS STARTING AT MIDNIGHT anyways i'm gonna go to bed now