Author's Note: Hey guys, in the thirty seconds between my finishing this chapter and actually posting it, I found out that my close friend's mom died unexpectedly on Sunday. I'm claiming relevancy on the grounds of all of our main characters being without one or more of their parents. Anyway, she and her younger brother have now lost both their parents, so please send them a prayer if you so believe.

Thanks,

Speed of Darkness

Three things needed to happen, and they needed to happen fast.

First, we needed to find Aang. As I was particularly invested in his presence and well-being, I didn't like having him out of my sight in some unknown location in a structurally unsound ruin of an air temple that contained lots of sights that would cause him to throw a violent grief fit. That, and we couldn't really leave without him, as Katara and Sokka wouldn't allow it, and none of us knew how to fly Appa.

Second, I needed to get back to my ship. My leg hurt. It hurt so bad. My capacity for "toughing it out" was very nearly used up, and I didn't know how much longer I could go before I succumbed to the agony and allowed myself to slip into the darkness that was edging my sight. I needed my ship's physician to give me something to make this stop hurting.

Lastly, I needed to get the Avatar to the Father Lord. I was so done with entertaining him with field trips and small talk. I didn't mind Aang as a person, and I even thought he was a pretty great kid, but I didn't need a friend. I needed my honor back, along with my father's love, the respect of my people, the company of my girlfriend, and the right to sleep in my own spirits-blessed bedroom again.

Before my mental to-do list could be swallowed by the pain that simply refused to be ignored, I said, "We can do one of three things: we could wait here and let Aang come and find us, or you two could go try to find a way out of here and locate Aang quickly, or we could all three go."

"But you can't walk," Katara objected.

"I would need help," I explained.

"I don't think splitting up is a good idea right now," Sokka said. "We could just end up getting more lost, and you probably shouldn't be left alone in a dark, underground portion of strange ruins with a badly broken leg. So wait here, or look for Aang?"

"Even if we help," Katara cautioned, "Moving you will hurt quite a bit."

"I can deal with it."

"If we were to look for Aang, where would we even start?" Katara wondered. "This temple is huge."

"Let's try to find our way back to where Appa is," Sokka suggested. "Aang has to go back for Appa eventually, right?"

"Yeah," Katara agreed. "Good thinking, Sokka."

"Alright," I said. "Let's go then."

Katara slipped her shoulders under one of my arms, and Sokka mimicked her gesture. They lifted me into an upright position between them. It didn't work perfectly, as I was taller than both of them, but they managed to keep my weight off my legs. Moving did hurt, but at least it was a step in the direction of leaving.

Our progression was painfully slow as we maneuvered out of the rubble that had been the treacherous ceiling above us. It seemed as though whatever part of the temple we had fallen into was not open to the air—there was no outside light at all. We could only see as far as the periphery of the sphere of light coming from the fire in my hand.

Sokka navigated. I did not help. I was rather preoccupied with the two hugely important and incredibly difficult tasks of remaining conscious and keeping up our light source. I was completely unaware of where we were and where we were going.

A few millennia passed before we finally emerged into what I dimly recognized as Aang's bedroom. It was dark by then, so I kept up the fire, even though I knew I was fading fast. They set me down gently on Aang's bed, and I tried unsuccessfully not to grimace as the motion jostled my leg.

"Well, Appa's still here," Sokka said as he looked outside. "That's a good sign."

Katara sat down on the floor next to the bed and said, "There's nothing left to do but wait. He'll come back tonight, won't he?"

"I hope so," I murmured.

"He will," Sokka said with his usual conviction. That was the last thing I remember hearing.

"Zuko. Zuko, wake up. Wake up, Prince Zuko."

I couldn't identify the voice right away, but it wanted me to wake up. I hadn't known I had fallen asleep.

"Please, Prince Zuko, open your eyes."

I did as the familiar voice instructed and was pleased to find that the voice belonged to Uncle. I noticed that Uncle looked very worried, much more worried than I had seen him since—well, my muddled brain would come up with an example later. Beyond Uncle, I saw a grayish sky, like the color it is the hour before sunrise.

"What—" I started to ask, but it didn't come out of my mouth sounding like a word, so I gave up on it. I seemed to be in a considerable amount of pain, and it was coming from my leg.

I heard Uncle giving orders, and then I felt hands picking me up. I wanted to fight them, but my body wasn't quite up to it just then. The sky disappeared and was replaced with a familiar looking ceiling. Then I was being set down again, and I was a bit more comfortable here. A man began fussing over me, and after a moment's thought I recognized him as my ship's physician. I didn't remember his name.

I heard him ask, "Are you hurt?" I was confused, because I thought my injury would be more apparent to him in his clarity of thought than to me in my haze of pain.

I was slightly less confused when I heard a quiet "No, sir" from somewhere near me. He hadn't been talking to me, but I did wonder who was there.

"Then get out," the physician snapped.

"Who—?" I managed to articulate.

Katara moved into my view. "It's me, Katara," she clarified.

"What happened?" I asked her.

"I told you to get out! You have no place here!"

"Stay," I commanded. Some of my mind's fuzziness was clearing up, and I was beginning to remember some of the things that transpired at the air temple. "What happened?" I asked again.

"We waited most of the night for Aang to come back. Your guards returned just a little while after you fell asleep. When Aang showed up, we tried to wake you, but you only seemed half-aware of what was going on. So we brought you back on Appa, and we just got here a few minutes ago. Your Uncle was very worried." That sounded about right.

I was helped into a sitting position and something was held against my lips. "Drink," he said. "It'll help with the pain." I obeyed; it tasted foul, and I told him so.

"You probably don't want to stay for this, girl," he said, ignoring my complaint. "It'll make you sick to see me fix an injury this bad."

"Actually, sir, I helped out with quite a bit of the nursing that went on in my tribe, and I've patched a few people up. It doesn't bother me anymore. I'd like to stay and see how you do this, if you don't mind."

"Prince Zuko, do you mind if she stays?" he asked me. I shook my head. I was feeling sleepier, and I thought it had something to do with whatever I had just drunk.

"Alright, then, but stay out of my way," he grouched, and then turned to me and ordered, "You lie back down now."

I did, and I was soon unconscious again.

I woke up in my bed in the room I had been sharing with Uncle. I felt the opposite of tired, and I suspected I had been asleep for a very long time. My leg didn't feel good, but it was much more bearable now, and I wasn't going to complain about the improvement. Truthfully, I'd been in much worse pain than that caused by this injury—burns hurt a lot.

I was alone, and I didn't feel confident that I could get up, so I stayed where I was. It wasn't terribly uncomfortable, but it did leave me alone with my thoughts.

Of the three items on my mental to-do list, two could be checked off, which wasn't too bad considering they'd been accomplished while I was injured and unconscious. We had the Avatar. We had gotten back to the ship, and they fixed my leg up. I wasn't sure yet if I had any damage control to run, but I wouldn't know until I was able to talk to someone.

My remaining objective was to take the Avatar back to the Fire Nation. The main delay to this was that I still had to take the Water Tribe siblings back to the South Pole, adding the better part of a week to our journey. I felt very uncomfortable with this delay—it was just asking something to go wrong. It wasn't that I had reason to mistrust Aang; I knew that he would come willingly enough, so long as Sokka and Katara hadn't yet succeeded in making him distrustful of the Fire Nation. It was more that I would be giving fate extra opportunity to take him away from me. Now, basically crippled, I would be even less prepared to respond to any bad circumstance.

The door creaked open, and Uncle peered in. "You're awake," he stated as he came inside and pulled a chair over to sit beside me.

I nodded. "What's going on?"

"We are currently en route to the Fire Nation," he told me, surprising me.

"What about returning them to the South Pole?"

"I figured you would not want to," he explained, "So I fabricated an excuse to satisfy our guests. As far as they know, we received a messenger hawk while you were away that informed us that your sister is deathly ill, and we have no time to lose if we wish to reach her before she expires."

"They believe it? They're not insisting to be taken back?"

"No, they're quite sympathetic to the urgency of our situation, even if they believe it is due to a different cause. They did, however, want to ensure that they could get a ride back home at some point, and the Avatar volunteered to fly them back after he had met with the Fire Lord."

Well, he obviously wouldn't be doing that. "I'll have somebody see to it that they return safely after the Ava—after my honor is reinstated."

Uncle nodded.

"So how bad is this?" I asked, gesturing to my leg.

"Quite bad," he said grimly. "Prince Zuko, the way it was told to me, you were lucky not to have lost it. You may never be able to run or fight on it again, but we won't know until it's healed."

I looked down. This was bad news. "A small price to pay," I said quietly, "For what I will gain in return for the Avatar."

"The bone is set, and you're allowed to move, so long as you don't try to walk on it," Uncle informed me. He reached behind my bed to grab something I had not noticed. "I had the crew find something to help with that."

I examined the crutches under a critical eye. "They'll do." So I would not be confined to this chamber for the entire return trip—good. "What time is it?"

"Time for tea!" Uncle exclaimed, and I rolled my eyes.

"Alright, give me a minute, I'll be right there," I told him.

I figured out the crutches fairly quickly, and ten minutes later saw me dressed presentably and sitting between Uncle and Aang as I sipped tea and listened to Sokka's exaggerated tale of our misadventures in the Southern Air Temple.

"Hold on," I interrupted him. "I was pretty out of it, but I think I would have noticed if we had encountered giant man-eating spider-foxes."

"Don't mind him," Katara told me, laughing. "He always does that, and there's nothing we can do to stop him from making his stories fantastic."

"Not bad, Sokka," Aang said. "But I found some really cool and real stuff in the air temple."

"What?" I inquired.

"Well, first—" Aang paused to reach into his shirt and pull out… "—meet Momo!" He held up what I guessed to be the little creature he ran off after.

"What is he?"

"Momo's a winged-lemur; a bunch of my old friends kept them as pets. He's proof that everything from my home isn't gone and dead."

"That's wonderful, Aang," I said politely, because I didn't have much of an opinion on his obtaining a pet. "What does he eat?"

"Usually whatever Sokka's trying to eat," Katara answered with a grin.

"And he can fly!" Aang informed us.

"I would expect no less from an airbender's pet," Uncle said.

"Alright, so besides finding Momo, what else did you do that kept you busy in the temple for hours into the night?"

"Well, Momo led me into this enormous room that I'd never seen before," Aang recounted. "It was full of statues—hundreds or thousands of them. Each one was different, and after looking at a bunch of them, I realized that they were my past lives, the Avatars who came before me. There was one who I knew."

"Which one?" Katara asked. "How did you know him?"

"I…don't know how I knew it was him, as I haven't heard his name before, but it was Roku, the Avatar before me."

"Interesting," Uncle mused. "Did you know, Prince Zuko, that Avatar Roku was a friend of your great-grandfather before the war started?"

I didn't know that, and I was surprised to hear it—I hadn't imagined the fierce and famous Fire Lord Sozin to have been human enough to have friends. "I did not know that."

Aang continued, "Well, anyway, there was something about him that I just couldn't look away from, so I stood there looking at him for a really long time. When I realized how dark it had gotten and how long I must have been there, I went looking for you, but it was dark and I couldn't find you. Eventually I got so tired that I just went back to Appa, and I found you guys there. That was smart, going back there."

"It was my idea!" Sokka interjected.

"Katara and Sokka told me what happened to you," Aang went on. "I'm really sorry you got hurt. I wouldn't have brought you all up there if I had known it wasn't safe, and I definitely shouldn't have left you like I did. I'm really sorry."

"Don't worry about it," I said hastily. The words 'it's not a big deal' were on the tip of my tongue, but I refrained from saying them as I remembered how bad an injury I had suffered.

There was a little pause, and then Katara addressed me, "We heard your sister is ill. I'm so sorry."

"You seem to just have really terrible luck," Sokka observed.

Oh joy, I had to pretend to be sad over an ailing Azula. This would be the true test of my skills of deception. "I know," I said gravely. "I couldn't believe it when I heard. I haven't seen her in years, and I just—" I frowned and averted my eyes for a moment, then shifted the subject, "Will you two be in a lot of trouble for staying away so long?"

Katara and Sokka looked at each other unhappily. "Possibly," Sokka said. "They'll understand when we explain what happened, but they'll have spent a lot of time being worried. They won't forget that easily."

"I hate that we're doing this to Gran Gran," Katara said sadly. "And what if Dad comes home before we get back?"

"Then we would definitely be in trouble," Sokka told her. "He would never have approved of us leaving in the first place! We were supposed to be looking after the tribe while he was away."

"Hey, is there any chance we could send a letter to our grandmother to warn her that we won't be back right away?" Katara asked Uncle and me.

"I'm afraid not," Uncle apologized. "A messenger hawk wouldn't survive for that long in such a cold environment. It would expire before it ever reached the South Pole."

"Oh," she said. "Thanks anyway."

As Uncle apologized for their current position, I thought, You shouldn't have come. It was a bad idea from the start. But now that they were no longer a setback to my getting what I wanted, I found that I didn't mind their presence so much anymore.

I was walking on deck that evening—practicing with my crutches—when I found the Avatar, his lemur on his shoulder, sitting on his bison's head. He was watching the sunset.

"Aang," I acknowledged him.

He glanced at me, and I was surprised to see that he had been crying.

"Are you okay, Aang? What's wrong?"

He rubbed his eyes with his fists and hopped with an airbender's inherent lightness and grace off of Appa's head. "I…didn't tell everything that happened back at the temple."

"You can talk to me," I encouraged him. "You can tell me anything, and I'll keep it between us." That was an Azula saying—it was only ever used for evil—so I hoped that using it didn't make me the antagonist in this exchange. It probably did.

"When I was growing up, I didn't know either of my parents; that's just the way the Air Nomads lived. I had Monk Gyatso instead. He was my favorite person in the whole world." Aang paused. "I saw him there, Zuko. His skeleton. I knew it was him from the pendant he wore. He—I knew he had to be dead by now, but…I just….Nobody ever buried his body…and he died violently, as his home was destroyed and his people killed." Aang was crying again. "I wasn't there, and I should have been..."

"I'm sorry, Aang," I said, and I pulled him into a hug that would have been awkward (for me) even without the crutches making the gesture difficult. "But he would have been happy to know that you made it out okay, and you're still alive today to continue your people's presence in the world."

He nodded and hugged me back, burying his face in my shirt and shaking as he cried. He had lost so much—suddenly, as it would seem to him—and he had so much grieving to do. I thought this situation incredibly awkward, but I was not quite callous enough to refuse the kid a shoulder to cry on.

Poor kid. And on top of all this, I was going to betray him. And I thought Azula was evil.