Disclaimer: Avatar: The Last Airbender is the sole property of its creators and Nickelodeon. The only thing I'm getting out of this is some good fun.
"What's that noise?" He pressed his face against the bars, wrapping his hands around the cool steel. It felt natural, more familiar than the cold of the steppes where he'd lived before. A place he hadn't seen in many years, and he sometimes wonder if he hadn't simply made up.
At this point, other prisoners had mimicked him. He couldn't see their neighboring cells, but he could hear their muffled shuffling. The visual forms he'd put to those invisible people sprung to mind, and he could see them clearly, dirty faces peering into the flame-lit corridor with similar confusion. Slowly, their voices rose over the quiet crackle of the torches.
"Guard! What's going on?" "Hey, Sinzu! Anyone seen Sinzu?"
There it was again. An explosion that echoed through the chambers, rattling the walls and shaking loose rock from the ceiling. Dust filled the air and obscured the firelight. One of the prisoners gave an excited cry – or maybe it was him? He'd long ago lost the ability to distinguish himself from the sparse furnishings of his cell.
"It's an earthquake!" someone shouted, and the murmurings of the other prisoners rose into yells. "It can't be an earthquake!" "Is it the Earth Kingdom?"
It couldn't be the Earth Kingdom. They'd heard the guards say that the Earth Kingdom had fallen. That the Avatar had been murdered while on the run, a criminal to the world at large.
And that was one thing they all understood.
"We'll be buried alive!" someone else cried, probably the new prisoner. The man was right – the prison was underground. But what he didn't realize was that they'd been buried alive years ago.
So this strange turn of events was welcome – a sign that they weren't yet dead. For if something unusual could happen – if they could recognize that it was happening – then maybe there was a chance everything would change. His grip on the bars tightened as hope, an unfamiliar concept, once more crept through his chest.
A red-robed figure sprinted through the dust motes, causing them to swirl behind him.
"Sinzu, wait!" he shouted and the figure obeyed him, though a hundred similar cries echoed through the corridor. The black-bearded man paused, staring at him with foreign eyes. "What's happening, Sinzu?"
"An Earth Kingdom force, from the north," the firebender managed weakly, and he suddenly realized why his eyes looked so strange. Sinzu was terrified.
The look of terror on another man's face somehow reminded him that there could be a reason to be afraid. Until then, difference was all he could register. And anything different had to be good. But now, he knew, there was something else that 'different' could be.
"Sinzu, open these doors," he said hurriedly. It was already too late. The ground shook again, and Sinzu shook even more, and within a moment he was gone. "Sinzu! Come back!"
The men's cries were also growing as the guard disappeared, awareness supplanting any excitement they'd felt. He had always thought that the enemy of his enemy had to be his friend. But in reality, every Fire Nation citizen was an enemy to the Earth Kingdom.
They were just Fire Nation citizens who were already conveniently locked up.
So the explosions changed to distant screams, and then to closer ones. And their hope changed to fear, and then to resignation.
After a time, the Earth Kingdom soldiers arrived. Some of the prisoners stayed calm, others begged for their lives. He just stared at those faces. Those beautifully different faces.
He cherished his unknown fate. His changed providence. And if he would be buried alive for real, he at least knew he'd been alive before.
At that moment, he no longer belonged to a world of torchlight and cold bars.