Work Text:
The candles flickered evenly, but they brought him no answers, no peace, even if his anger towards his friends had cooled with time and meditation. They didn’t understand, wouldn’t understand, mired in war as they had been since the days they were born, but getting frustrated with them wasn’t going to change that. Or give him a solution.
None of this was fair. But it had been unfair from the beginning, and no one was going to make it fair for him.
That was, after all, his job.
Meditation failed to lift the weight hung round his neck, or the cruel choices it carried. They demanded he bring death with his own hands. And Aang could not accept that; there were no words for how repulsive it was to him. It felt like a betrayal – of himself, and of his people. And if Aang betrayed them, then what else was left? It was only him. Even aside from his personal aversion to killing, didn’t he have a responsibility to the memory of his people, too?
But if he failed to stop the Fire Lord, then that would be a betrayal of them too, and everyone else in the world besides. And Aang could not accept that, either.
His friends insisted that the only way to stop the Fire Lord was to kill him, and even though everything in Aang recoiled and desperately insisted there must be an alternative…he couldn’t actually see that path. Only a deep-seated conviction that it existed kept him from falling into despair, but unless he could find it, and soon, the cruel choices that weighed him down would cease to be a choice at all, and make a betrayer out of Aang.
He drifted off, hoping that sleep would bring him closer to his answer.