Fuel To My Fire - Book Three (ATLA Zuko Fanfiction)

Chapter Twenty-One

Sakari's POV

We had been floating for a while and it had gotten dark now, Sokka had fallen asleep about half an hour ago and was now snoring quietly. So, I had decided to softly run my finger over his cheek to try and get him to slap himself.

"What on earth are you doing?" Zuko asked, watching me from the other side of the war balloon.

"What? You never did this to Azula?" I asked, getting Sokka to twitch a little.

Zuko just gave me a confused look and I shrugged and turned my attention back to Sokka, stroking his face softly until he finally smacked himself awake.

"Ow! Hey!" He complained upon realised what I'd done.

"Look, we're here!" Zuko interrupted us.

We rushed to the front of the balloon and looked into the distance at a large volcano in the middle of the ocean.

"Sakari, can you give us some cover?" Zuko asked.

I nodded and bended some water from the clouds around us, creating a mist around us as we approached the prison.

"As long as we're quiet, we should be able to get down there without being seen." Zuko told us.

As soon as we floated over the volcano, however, the balloon began falling rapidly. Zuko tried to punch some more fire into it but it wasn't working anymore.

"What's happening?!" I whisper yelled at Zuko.

"The air outside is as hot as the air inside, so we can't fly." Zuko explained.

"So, what do we do?" I asked as the balloon started falling faster.

"I don't know. Crash landing?" Sokka suggested.

We landed in the boiling water and skidded across it, landing with a jolt on the shore and being thrown from the balloon. We all landed with our faces in the ground and tried to make as little noise as possible, luckily our grunts were muffled by the dirt.

"How are we supposed to get off the island now?" Zuko asked, looking at the damaged balloon.

"We'll figure something out." Sokka stated. "I suspected it might be a one-way ticket."

"You knew this would happen and you wanted to come anyway? Are you insane?" I whisper yelled at my brother.

"Dad might be here. I had to do something." Sokka answered me. "And you already lost one dad not too long ago, I'm not letting you lose another."

"What's he talking about?" Zuko asked me, and I realised I hadn't told him about Kato.

"Um, Kato died when he helped me escape." I told Zuko.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Ri..." He said, pulling me into a side hug as we watched Sokka fiddle with the war balloon.

He packed the balloon part of it into the base first and then started to push it towards the water, sending it below the surface and out of sight.

"What are you doing?" Zuko and I asked in unison.

"It doesn't work anyway, and we don't want anyone to find it." Sokka explained.

"I hope you know what you're doing." Zuko stated.

We quickly and quietly snuck into the prison and found where they kept the guard uniforms, we took one each and quickly put them on over our clothes.

"I hope this works." Zuko stated.

"We just need to lay low until we find dad." Sokka said.

There was suddenly a rush of guards moving down the hallway to our right, and one of them noticed us standing here.