A/N: My apologies for the long wait, I've been busy and unable to think '. This is the final chapter of Incandescence, but there will be yet another sequel, so look out for it. I must say...ZUKO IS SO SEXY IN THE DAY OF BLACK SUN EPISODES! X3 ...I am now done fangirling. Please enjoy the final chapter of Incandescence!

Zuko and his uncle, now called by the names Junior and Mushi, were safely seeking a little medical help in a small village they came across. There was something about this nice girl helping Iroh with his skin rash that Zuko liked. She was nice, despite her many probing questions. She was a good change from any yelling soldiers or rogues any day. Her name was Song, right? Yes it was. She kindly offered a meal, an offer his uncle couldn't resist in a heartbeat.

For the first time in a long while, Zuko felt…connected to someone when he talked to the girl later that evening outside. She too had a scar to show the pain of her past. What she said really made him open his eyes. But he did not feel that same attraction to this girl, and so, upon leaving he felt only a tinge of remorse for having stolen their animal for means of transportation.

He faced such separation, such hunger, such sadness for a long while. Wandering aimlessly, fighting his inner conscious on who to steal from or what to do otherwise to make ends meet. He could not remember what it was like to sit down, comfortably in his own cabin, and eat a hot meal. For fleeting moments he would wish to have that comfortable life he had while chasing the Avatar in the early days of his quest. He had slimmed much, therefore the only clothes he had were loose and roomy.

At last he and his uncle were reunited after such a separation only in tragedy. It was sheer luck his uncle recovered so well. Zuko was, despite being with his dear relative again, thrown into another bout of depression and anxiety. He had lost his direction in life. This mindset had even pulled him into sickness, which he recovered from with some eye-opening revelations. Again, he was drawn to a girl. A girl from Ba Sing Se named Jin, who had a crude beauty about her. She wasn't particularly well dressed or kept, or even overwhelmingly pretty, but she was human. That was what he liked.

This girl must've had some invisible strings pulling him, or perhaps he was beginning to lose him mind to loneliness. He actually went out of his way for her and nearly kissed her. But before doing so he stopped, and remembered, then pulled away. "It's…complicated," was what he told her. Of course it was, she would never understand him. She knew him as a tea-serving boy who lived alone with his uncle. This girl, Jin, did not know he was the prince of the Fire Nation, nor did she know his real name.

His gut wretched tight every time he thought of these teenage troubles, making countless efforts to rid himself of them with no luck. He even began to think of Mai, the girl he left behind in the Fire Nation with his horrid sister. As quiet and …well creepy as she was, she was nice to him. She seemed to respect him. He thought about her most often, her and that horrible, mixed up mess of a family he left behind. Never once did he let his mind wander to…

"Kaida…?" He had been walking along one of the streets to his uncle's tea shop on a sunny day. Either he was finally becoming insane, his tired eyes were playing a cruel trick on him, or he was really looking at what he saw.

The blonde haired girl had passed along the street perpendicular to the one he was trotting along behind a small group of stuck up aristocrats. She was wearing an outfit much like the rest of the group, an Earth-styled long gown and her long, pale hair tied up. She had looked over the instant he breathed her name. Her face was a mosaic of mixed emotions, mostly surprise. Her eyes, he had noticed in that second in time had shifted from a melancholy blue to a vivid green. That is what gave her away to him, he was sure it was her from that fact alone. His heart leapt and jumped in his chest so furiously, he thought it may just leapt out of his throbbing breast and strike the wall of a nearby building. She had kept walking along, following this strange crowd unsure of her own observation.

Without thinking he had flown at a sprint in her direction, tangling with the end of the train of people in a narrow alleyway. He called her name again, but no one answered and the people filed away noiselessly. Color vividly rose in his cheeks, his eyes burned with moisture, and his heart fell dead in his chest. He had been so close; he saw the incandescence of the sunlight on her little red and silver pendant hanging about her neck shining as a striking reminder, against those subtle earth toned clothes, of the nation he left behind…