Honestly, this isn't actually that long of a chapter, but it is proabably my favorite, the second-to-last installment. I completed this story (A 65 page document, size 12) in less than a month. And I hope you've enjoyed it so far. I will post the final chapter soon.
The comet blazes through a sky spattered with blood red color, and Zuko, up in the evening air on Appa, has never felt so powerful. However, he knows it the comet will only empower Azula, too, as well as his father. His father, who will, at best, be dead by the time the distant morning arrives. What kind of world has this become, where he wishes for the death of his father, his nation's era of prosper and strength? What kind of world has this become, where the worst thing that could happen is his father and king's survival?
"Don't worry," Katara assures him. "We can take Azula."
"It's not us I'm worried about," Zuko responds. "It's Aang. What if he doesn't have the guts to take out my father?" He gazes at Katara, a worried gaze of flickering ambition. "What if he loses?"
"Aang won't lose." Her voice is confident, but Zuko sees right through it as if it is made of glass, glass with spider-web cracks blossoming from the breaking point. She takes a feeble breath. "Do you think you'll be able to do it? You know, kill her, if it comes to it?"
Zuko looks away. "Azula isn't to me exactly like Sokka is to you."
"Obviously, but…"
"I don't know, Katara." he replies. "But I think I'll have to find out."
His future comes into view then, on the horizon Zuko has ever been putting off. The sheltered island of the approaching Fire Nation capitol glows with the lanterns and hopes of the waiting. Zuko pities them, for he knows he must crush their desires and assume the role of their greatest enemy if he ever wants to be their hero.
"There." He guides Appa's reins into the city, unnoticed by the citizens huddled inside with their families waiting for their loved ones to return. Do they know they support the wrong side, or, like Zuko once was, are they blinded by the great lie of expanding prosperity, fighting for a country without legitimate moral beneath its surface? Whatever the case, the capitol is a ghost town; no one walks the cobblestone streets, no one sells their signature wares, no one offers loud praise to the Fire Lord. Despite the comet's strength, a few of the common people of the Fire Nation are scared to death inside as their sons and daughters and fathers become murderers, disguising their terror as pride for the generals and the rulers and the government. Those people, these higher classes, are the ones who actually believe whole-heartedly in their cause, while some scarce others in the lower classes do not but are not strong enough to say so.
The palace courtyard is empty of onlookers; Zuko feels a twang of helpless sympathy as he sees his eager sister sit in front of an invisible crowd with four sages about to crown her beneath a scarlet sky. She is a ruler, but no one dares to watch her ascend to power, afraid they'll be disintegrated in the falling flames. Azula does not notice Katara and Zuko at first, but the sages do. They freeze solid and their hands clutch desperate the crown for balance.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" Azula barks, whirling to face them. Her voice is strained but still commanding, and her bangs hang choppily in her face, in the eyes that Zuko knows are losing their sight of that slim slice of sanity they once held. "Do it!"
"Sorry," Zuko says loudly, stepping off Appa's saddle and landing on the dirt with a thud, "but you're not going to become Fire Lord today." He raises his chin high as Azula catches sight of him at last. "I am."
Zuko notices Azula's broken stubs of nails as she swipes her uneven bangs from her vision. "Ha!" she laughs. "You're hilarious."
Katara steps up next to Zuko, her face determined and her eyes intense. "And you're going down."
Azula grins, a groundless smirk, and says, too eager, "There's only one way to settle it, then. Agni Kai. The showdown that was always meant to be!"
"You're on," Zuko accepts, and the burning sky becomes a war banner, the color of the blood one of them will have to spill. Someone always has to win in an Agni Kai, a meeting of fire, and Zuko knows that the fact that their blood is the same will not stop ruthless and crazed Azula. She, unlike Zuko, does not fear the shreds of her destroyed conscience, the ghosts of her haunting childhood memories, if they are even there at all in this hollow shell of danger and insanity, the girl he once called family that stands broken before him.
"Zuko!" Katara hisses, yanking him backward. "What are you doing? She knows she can't take us both so she's trying to separate us!"
"I know, but I have to do this." "But even you admitted to your uncle that you would need help facing Azula!" "Something's off about her. I don't know what it is, but she's slipping." He shakes off Katara's arm and begins to move away. "And this way, no one else has to get hurt."
"Zuko, wait!" Katara says as an afterthought, and she gives him a quick, fleeting hug. "I have faith in you. In you and your fire."
"Thank you, Katara." And then he slips out of her grasp.
Katara reaches out for him again, face flushed, but he's already walking away from her, towards the center of the courtyard to where his fate will be decided forevermore. By him and him alone, in his struggles and effort. His fate has always been an unstoppable, runaway train. Now is the time it will either crash or finally succeed on its journey.
"Tick tock!" screeches Azula, already on the other side of the courtyard, while a lone Katara watches from the sidelines, as the sages have wisely disappeared somewhere. "Come, brother." She cackles a coarse laugh. "Unless you are afraid."
"Not a chance," Zuko replies gravely. He is not scared of her, he knows that. What he does fear is hurting her, his sister, his own flesh, and no matter how many time he'll deny it, a part of himself.
But, a voice in his head whispers. This is the girl who killed Mai.
This painful thought ceases only when he kneels on the parched ground, facing away from his sister's crouched form, who is doing the same. They collect their breath, their wills, their hatreds. They bottle up their fears and test their resolves, store away their thoughts. Azula prepares to kill him, and Zuko prepares to come to terms with the fact he may have to do the same.
Azula rises slowly, depositing her cape to the side of her with a familiar smooth air, but Zuko can still see the cracks in her appearance and emotions. "I'm sorry it had to end this way, brother."
Zuko stands as well, stares her in the hysterical eyes. "No, you're not."
Azula smiles with closed-lips and heavily-lidded eyes, then steps forward and sends a column of billowing fire at him almost elegantly. The battle for everything they are has begun, and one of them may not make it out. They are too young for this, but Azula's possible death blow has no hesitation.
Zuko dispels the fire in inch from his face and replies with a hellish orange assault of his own. He follows it up with a huge wall of red fire that meets the blue barrier of Azula's in the middle of their makeshift arena, and the world is lit up by their hatred for each other, made unbearably hot by the flames that have been fanned for at least fourteen years.
"There's a reason Father liked me best, brother dear!" Azula wails, kicking burning danger at him. The licking flames pass so close to the scarred side of his face that the heat is almost unendurable, nearly scalding, like the truth behind the fight, but Zuko grits his teeth and bears it, like everything.
"Yes?" he calls back. "But what of Mother?" Something in Azula's eyes flares as something else shatters; his comment has burned her more than the firebending, and he has no idea why. For Zuko has not seen Azula in front of the mirror as she wonders how and when she lost herself, seen her scream at the voice of her mother that took her too long to realize was only in her head; he has not witnessed the madness in her that she herself cannot escape since the day she was abandoned by the only people she could ever call her friends, the people who were incapable of calling her the same. All he sees is the deadly result, the person he himself could've been if he kept cupped in his hand his father's favor, instead of his mother's favor in his heart.
Zuko sends another jet of fire and it collides with Azula's counterattack, and the result is fire bursting in all directions and setting the tops of the ornate palace alight. Azula glances at the smoke billowing from her home, her one true castle, and sucks in a deep, rattling breath. She sends a powerful and terrifying display of bending his way, but Zuko, with greatest effort, manages to part it like the Red Sea, his foot slipping slightly. The sixteen-year-old, consequently, is almost unprepared when two burning jets appear from his sister's feet and send her soaring rapidly toward him, circling him like a scavenger in a wide arc of terrible light blue.
"You don't stand a chance!" Azula screeches wildly.
Zuko dives to the ground as a searing blaze catapults over his head, nearly missing. From the dirt he spins around as if break dancing, and sends red-hot bending in all directions, knowing it is his only chance to hit Azula that way. And he does; his sister's jets are broken and she tumbles to the ground, gasping both for air and in a surprise, and also groaning with pain.
"What?" Zuko taunts as she rises heavily to her feet, jaw clenched in utter disgust. "No lightning today?"
Azula's eyes are maniacal and burning with hatred as she screams back, "I'll show you lightning!" She summons the spark of electricity ominously, guiding it across her body in a manner that requires both precision and raw talent. Zuko takes up a position to defend himself, to redirect death and spit in its face once more.
But Azula's death blow does not rocket towards him, and he knows where it is going a split second before it is shot. It heads, crackling dangerously, to the sidelined Katara, who is too shocked and afraid to move or be quick enough to escape it. His friend, his companion, his confident, about to be killed by his sister.
He will not let this heartrending loss happen to him again. Not after Mai.
This is his fate, this interception of Katara's, and it has always been this way, no matter how much he fought it. Fate, with its cruel sense of desolate humor, has won its game, and Zuko is not sure which he'd rather have.
The pain is unendurable, unbearable, seemingly the end. Zuko, however, uses his last bit of fading strength to redirect most of the lightning, but cannot manage all of it. It makes his body, full of deadly fire, shudder uncontrollably and land painfully on the ground, convulsing and moaning in absolute hurt, more physical pain than he has ever experienced before.
"Zuko!" he hears Katara scream, horrified, but he does not have the strength to respond, cannot help her as she is left to deal with the jagged shards and remnants of an insane Azula. The pressuring darkness is closing in on him, but it will not follow through. The world is only halfway gone, and so is the pain, as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
Spirits, just let this end. he begs. The cruel joke has been revealed; end it now!
But the awful pain continues on, its sting undeniable and blocking out all thoughts other than Please just let me die!
The last thing he hears before he loses himself again in the hurt, is Azula's crazed laughter, the only thing that proves to him that this is not some kind of dream, no sick nightmare, because this is the part where he always wakes up, right when the terror and the pain is most intense.
Yet this time, he fears, and somehow hopes, that he won't.
Zuko falls into a state constantly falling in and out of consciousness, deaf and blind to the world but still breathing and writhing in utter pain, pain worse than a shattered heart, or a face scarred by his father's flames.