Burnt Out - Zuko x OC

It's Lonely At The Top

He'd started up the stairs and was peering into the rooms that they hadn't been assigned to the night before. They all looked eerily the same; dusty, undisturbed, like no one had ever stepped foot in them. The rest of the gang followed him to the second floor and while Aang and Katara tried their best to convince him he was overstepping implied boundaries, Kai and Toph just stood back and watched the show. Toph with amusement, Kai with indifference.

"She could be home any minute.." Aang mumbled nervously.

A cupboard in the wall caught the warrior's attention. He grabbed it and tugged, it didn't budge. "I'm not finished yet." He said over his shoulder to his sister and continued pulling, putting one foot against the wall for support. "Come! On!" He grunted.

The doors burst open, sending Sokka flying into the opposite wall. He drew his sword in response and the entire gang gasped as a dozen wooden marionettes fell out of the cupboard, held together only by their strings.

Kai stepped back. Words she faintly remembered brushed past her ear like a whisper.

Oh, you will make such a beautiful queen. The Queen of the Damned. And I, The Puppetmaster, the one pulling the strings.

She swatted at the air beside her but her knees already felt weak. Her entire body trembled as her vision went in and out between flashes of reality and a daydream. In those momentary hallucinations, she saw herself.

A throne made of bones sat on a mountain of bodies. The sky was crimson red with dark, rumbling storm clouds in the distance. An imaginary camera zoomed in slowly, giving her a front row seat to what she'd become.

She sat on her throne of skeletal remains with apathy showing on her face. Her jade eyes were no longer such, they'd become just as dark as the clouds above her. A crown made of teeth and rotting vines rested on her head. Her dress was a silky smooth charcoal grey and her fingernails were overgrown with dirt and blood caked around them. She was still barefoot, that hadn't changed, but her feet were cut open and bleeding from stepping on shards of broken bones.

She'd done this — all of this. The Fire Nation had fallen around her along with the rest of humanity, and now she ruled over their corpses.

A voice beckoned her from above. "Isn't it a lovely view?"

"It's nice." She glanced up and then back over the hellish landscape, considering the question. "But it's lonely at the top."

Thin strings trailing from her wrists to the sky went slack and after a brief freefall, the wooden crucifixes attached to them landed in the rubble beside her. Suddenly, Kai wasn't just an observant bystander in a nightmare about herself anymore. She was sitting on the throne looking down at her feet when a tall shadow loomed over her.

"You have never been alone, my love." It said. "Afterall, what is a queen without her king?"

She looked up without fear. The blackened skull of a buck with twenty point antlers stared back at her through hollow eye sockets. It's head was perched atop the body of a man, dressed in a robe that'd never seen the battles that got them there.

And to her horror, she found herself enamored by his beauty.

"You put up a good fight. Now.." He reached out and held her by the chin, running his thumb over her chapped lips. His beastly head cocked as he spoke. "Tell me you love me."

Her lips curved up into a small but sick smile. She loved him. Oh, spirits, did she love him.

Before she could stick around to watch herself become a monster, the inn flashed back in front of her. Kai was gripping the wall so hard that her nails were broken and bleeding. Her friends hadn't even taken notice of her mental departure. The reverberations of Sokka stomping up to the attic almost knocked her off of her feet.