? ? ? ? ? it's Way Too Late and i love dying and being dead and didn't wanna post a whole new fic so just decided to add to this one (also, side note: since they never met up w/ the white lotus again zuko and katara never went to fight azula, etc)

Fifteen facts about the end of the world.

i. They do not win the war. There are six of them, and they are children, and they do not win the war.

ii. Aang disappeared the two nights before the end of the world. Some small pathetic part of Zuko thinks it would be better if he stayed missing, because then he wouldn't have to die. But Aang is not that kind of person, though, no matter his personal feelings about murder for the sake of the world, and so he shows up, standing tall and confident and so so young.

iii. Zuko watches, and thinks that Aang is the kind of boy who will die with a smile on his face and hope in his heart. Aang is the kind of boy who will die.

iv. Zuko watches, and thinks that Ozai is the kind of man who would kill his own son, kill his own brother. Ozai is the kind of man who will kill.

v. Ozai is the kind of man who kills. The Avatar fights; the Avatar nearly wins. But Ozai is the kind of man who kills.

vi. Everything happens quickly after that.

vii. One of the blimps stutters and crashes into another, weakened by their assault; Katara is yelling and Suki is slipping over the railing and Suki is falling and Toph and Zuko have to work together to keep Sokka from jumping after her.

viii. And Zuko had known, he had known—the dragons are dead; the world is lost. (The dragons are alive, but not the one they need.)

ix. They flee (Katara is yelling about how they need to finish the job now and that Aang isn't dead he can't be dead we have to go check). They manage to take control of one of the failing blimps and retreat. And Katara is crying and Toph is shaking and Sokka is quiet as he steers. Zuko is very very still, tired, nails digging into his opposite palm to keep quiet.

x. The dragons are dead. The Avatar is gone.

xi. The Fire Lord's—the Phoenix King's, destroyer of worlds, Avatar killer, child killer, monster's—wrath sweeps across the Earth Kingdom.

xii. Zuko thinks about their tea shop in Ba Sing Se and the girl he went on a date with and Mai hiding behind her sleeves and Uncle showing him how to play Pai Sho and his mother leaving him and the last airbender dancing with the last dragons, and finds himself, very very quietly, crying.

xiii. Toph is the one to eventually ask "What do we do now?" and for the first time since Zuko has met her, she sounds exactly like the twelve year old she is, young and scared and utterly exhausted.

xiv. "Hide," one of them says; it doesn't matter who, "Survive. The world is ending. We have to find a way to survive in the new one."

xv. The dragons are dead. The Avatar is gone. They do not win the war.