Note: The prompt for this chapter is Missing Scenes/Post-Canon.

TW: implied/referenced suicide.

Void

Aang was on the battlefield again. He stood atop a rock pillar in the Wulong Forest. The sky was a clouded cerise, harsh with glaring shadows and a raging streak that made up the tail of Sozin's Comet. The same apprehension and anger stormed inside him, bubbling to the surface of everything.

And then, there was a pinprick of white light. Just a tiny star, and then it expanded so much that he had to cover his eyes.

His vision cleared. He found himself sitting with his legs crossed, his hands in a meditation pose. Around him was a peculiar material. It looked like constant twisting roots, like lodes knotting into themselves, making an impossible sculptured feat of wood and grain. The distinct scent of nature and wet soil after rain permeated the air.

"Where am I?" he asked into nothing.

There was a rumbling noise, and then an eye-shaped window appeared before him too, separating the bark. It was in the shape of an eye turned to the side. A purplish red barrier that he could see through blocked him from escape. Behind the barrier, he saw strange, oblong patterns and suggestions of shapes. A turquoise sky, unnatural poisonous clouds. Beyond that, a vivid river cutting through the earthen landscape. It had clusters of bobbing, luminescent algae upon the water's surface that cast an unusual light.

He gasped when his middle started to glow, white-blue designs appearing on his skin and through his clothes. The wooden bead necklace he wore lifted from his neck as if upon an invisible breeze. The fabrics he wore ruffled. A chill raised the hairs on his arms.

"Inside the Tree of Time," intoned an echoing feminine voice. It felt like it was coming from inside him. Illogical, reverberating.

He blinked, clutching at his sleeves, searching for the source of the light. "Who are you? Who's talking?" he asked in a panic.

"Raava," said the voice, continuing unperturbed. "I am part of you, Aang. I am the spirit of light…the spirit of the Avatar."

Immediately, it was as if all the pieces had fallen into place. There was a calmness about him that settled on his shoulders, his chest. He knew, without a doubt, that this Raava was telling the truth, that the voice was someone he could trust. It was as if he had reconnected with a long-lost friend.

"You are here because you have bended another's energy…and that energy has corrupted you."

Aang reeled backward, banging onto the hollow trunk of the tree. "What? But—"

"Let time show you," Raava interrupted, and he could almost imagine a figure gesturing to the tree that surrounded him, a faceless spirit guiding him on this journey he did not want to take.

Images fizzled into existence around him, floating visions that surfaces upon the bark. They were blurred along the borders and had a quality to them that made them appear almost ethereal. The first he saw was of someone familiar.

It was Gyatso running away from his old room in the Southern Air Temple, the scroll Aang had left behind when he ran away clutched in his hand. His eyebrows were drawn together, features set into one of dread.

"Aang has gone!" he shouted into the empty halls. "We need to send out a search party immediately! Who knows what will happen in this typhoon!"

Another moving image popped near it, this time a courtyard full of elder monks, murmuring to each other, pointing at the deep red sky. He could not tell what time of day it was, for there were stars that peeked out from behind the Patola Mountains, and a glimmer of sunrays limning the edges of the valleys at the same time.

Another image, and it was fire. Screams, children he had known yelling through crumbling rubble. Dote, his friend, struggling to pull out his broken leg from beneath a fallen pillar. Blood cascaded from a cut on his forehead. Behind him, a great fireball scorched a group of lemurs into a crisp, and their corpses were left to fall with a resounding thud onto the blackened tile of what used to be Aang's home.

"We have to get out of here!" bellowed a young adult monk with hardly a beard patch on his chin. He had a limp. An arrow had pierced his thigh and rivulets of red dribbled down his leg. "Gather the children! Quickly!"

Aang saw the tiles on the roofs come crashing to the ground, the silhouette of a couple clutching onto each other's hands as they plunged together to their death in the crags below, a bison calf yowling for its mother who lay in a lifeless burning heap.

Aang's heart hammered in his chest, hard and fast. Sweat pooled behind his neck when he realized what he was seeing.

"Scenes from your past," said Raava, not unkindly. "Events that you missed, that you could not live through, because you could not save your people."

Everything seemed to collide in on itself when he recognized Gyatso again in another image, this time in a falling apart structure surrounded by Fire Nation soldiers. The elderly man spun in a circle, an arc, lifting his arms and pushing them outward. The soldiers stiffened, scratched at their throats, and fell to their knees breathless. Some coughed, others struggled, a few of them writhed until they did not anymore.

Then, without warning, Gyatso fell as well with a look of listlessness in his gray eyes. He slumped onto the wall, and he stared at the ceiling, succumbing to his own suffocation tactic.

When Aang saw this, he grasped for his head, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. He did not want to see any of it. None of it at all. The regret was already too great.

He wanted…

He wanted…

He did not know what he wanted, nor what he could want.

But then, like hopelessness itself, there came a foggy vision at last. A forgotten memory.

A man, elderly and ragged, collapsed against a boulder in a new image that took over the previous one. His armor was falling apart as he stared into the tempestuous sky above him. A pang resounded in Aang's spirit, as if the man was calling out to him.

"I'm sorry, Raava," the man rasped out, sagging ever further downward, "I failed to bring peace. Even with Vaatu locked away, darkness still surrounds humanity."

Raava hummed from inside Aang in agreement. "You see Aang, your spirit must be unbendable to bend another's energy," she explained while Aang's vision became more distorted with guilt. "The problem is there is no one with an unbendable spirit…not even the Avatar's. You are human, and therefore there is a darkness, no matter how small, that resides inside you. There can be no light without darkness, and no darkness without light. Even if you were to eliminate one, the other would appear again no matter how long it takes."

Aang did know, and he understood it. He wished that he did not.

He remembered the slight moment of hesitation, the cry for help he imagined Gyatso would exclaim as his and Ozai's energies melded for that short, tumultuous moment. He remembered how he wanted more from Ozai than his bending. Just for that second before he righted himself.

He had thought of Katara. She was the one how had taught him how to hope again, and maybe he could think of her again.

When he looked up again, the tree had shown him another moving picture, another moment he had never witnessed himself.

It showed himself sleeping in a room made of planks of wood that swayed gently from side-to-side. He was laying on a pile of white furs, his upper torso wrapped with bandages, and he wore a pair of tattered yellow pants.

Katara hovered over him. She had bags under her eyes. Her braid that rested along her spine was messy. Her hands were encased in glowing water, and she moved them along his arms and legs, pressing them onto his chest.

When she finished, she looked worn. The water snaked back into the pouch. There were shadows that darkened her face. "Please, Aang," she begged in a low murmur. "Please wake up. I don't know what to do without you."

The scene of the two of them shifted, melted, and then he observed her again but in a different light.

Aang saw Katara's face highlighted and illuminated with a deep orange and blue as the two colors clashed against each other from across a vast ocean. A wall of light pushed up against another stalwart wall. They were two opposites fighting to maintain the balance he could not keep.

She stood alert in the Fire Nation palace's courtyard where they had reunited, looking out over the horizon.

"Aang," she whispered, "Don't give up. I believe in you." Then, even lower as she clutched her hands to her heart, she added, "I love you."

Katara screamed for him afterward when the colors brightened and grew all the more intense. Her hands balled into fists, and there was nothing he could do but watch.