At first, the panic around him is intoxicating in the worst way possible, contagious, threatening to pull out the legs under him and wash him out into the ocean of fear, being pulled under the waves of emotion, and he can feel anger rising within himself. But he manages to fight it back by pushing away other, much more recent imaginary (darkness, and confusion, and everything breaking apart, himself as a man drowning and having nothing to hold onto) and pulling up that of bygone times of panic less dire, serious still but one that he could easily rule and control. Panic that wasn't as much out of his grasp.

When his eyes come back into focus and the rigidity of his body softens into simple tension, and he looks at Zuko, he has drawn from the feelings that a fire in one of his son's rooms once caused. Terrible, but something that could easily be understood, to which they knew the answers and solutions, that was only a matter of reducing damage once all people were accounted for.

There seems to be a simple answer here, too, if he understands it correctly.

"I think not that we must know what to protect to do so; it seems that knowing whom to keep from damaging it should be enough." The questions is how to find those people, but they at least know that they seem to be speaking strangely. "If all who are possessed speak and act such as this man, we might be capable of recognizing them even without knowing how they would behave at another time."