A/N: SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 12.

Today was a nice day for pain.

The sun melted onto his back as it faded away, disappearing behind the curtain of water. The warmth felt familiar, but it was not the same. The warmth he remembered was of a house built of despair and furnished with regret. He remembered how he always sat on the couch, looking at the rich color of expectations. He remembered how he always ran his fingers over the fabric, feeling the rough texture of hate.

Revenge, his father had said. It resonated through his head, and for a moment his eyes burned and his arms twitched to steer back and rid the world of the voice. The word repeated itself in his head. It echoed to the victims of his bloodbending, it echoed through his muscles and into his bloodstream. The breeze blew by, sweeping his hair and churning it around along with the voice.

The breeze he felt and the breeze he remembered were not the same. The breeze he remembered was of bitterness, it was a wind that pierced his soul and sunk into it, opening up a space in which his father filled with terror. His father never thanked the wind for its service, but his father never spoke a language that included words of love and happiness.

The next time the breeze blew by, it passed right through him, carrying his words to his brother's ears. Let's run away. There was nothing to run to and nobody to do the running. He spoke a language similar to his father. He was taught only the words of pain and regret, and he yearned to learn how to speak words to ask for forgiveness. To ask for a chance at happiness. In this he used the words he knew to also say the words he never said and could never learn to say. He wanted time to learn to be forgiven. His brother took the glove from the side compartment. It would never happen.

The first and last tear he ever shed was not an actual tear. It was words, spewing out of his eyes, being drawn by the wind and thrown into the sky. No one ever knew what the words said, but his brother said a short portion of it.

"Just like old times." The words were in his language. Saying things that they couldn't say. Just like old times meant that they would never learn to be forgiven. The old times included sweat and blood poured into a couldron mixed with a spice of emptiness. The old times meant they would stay in pain, forever living as the children of a man who could not learn to live. Old times were the irony of living for a lifeless man. Old times were in the past, and the present. Old times meant there would be no future.

Then the world turned to ashes. But it really wasn't the world, it was just a single tear(that never got to be one) and two lives(that never got to live) drifting through the water as a strip of the sky turned gray and black.

The voice died in his head along with him.

A/N: So I finally caught up on the finale and the last scene with Noatak and Tarrlok really stuck to me and I needed to write the scene out. This is roughly based off a version I wrote while half-asleep at 3 AM.