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By the time Asami Sato was seven, she knew there was no shape better suited for building than the triangle. She knew—but she didn't yet fully understand why—that you could see the Curved Array glittering in the night sky all year round, but the bright core of the Silver River only in the warmer months. She knew every component of an engine by name, knew the finished puzzle of gleaming parts like a friend, and knew that when a spark met gasoline it could make a mountain of metal move like a living thing.
Asami also knew that if you took away one of a triangle's three points, the shape would collapse in on itself. She knew—though she didn't think she'd ever understand why—that somebody could rip a hole in the world and still the sun rose every morning and the stars crept across the night sky and the city continued humming along as it always did. She knew there was more than one kind of silence, knew the subtleties of each like a tattoo on her brain, and knew, intimately, what fire could do to a human body.
She also knew she wasn't supposed to wander outside the main house unsupervised.
She knew this. And she knew why—oh, did she ever know why—but—
But she was bored. But it might as well have been forever since her father had said wait here for me and locked the door of his study. But Li, the doorman, had stepped away to help the housekeepers move a heavy cabinet down the stairs. But the new Satomobile model was scheduled to launch the following week, and the time-strapped workers on the assembly line had little interest in playing 20 questions with the boss's kid. But there was a pond on the estate grounds—with emerald-bodied dragonfly hummingbirds that zipped to and fro on wings of sparkling mica, and a pair of inquisitive little turtle ducks wearing intricately-patterned shells she could stare at for hours, and a nest box she'd helped build for them with her mom—and she hadn't been there in ages.
They used to have dinner by the pond together, sometimes, her and her parents, and then they used to have tea there together, sometimes, her and her dad, and then, once the empty third chair started screaming too loud, they didn't go there at all.
She'd always liked dropping pebbles into the water and watching the ripples race outward, losing definition and becoming fainter and fainter until the water absorbed them. Sometimes, if the pebble was big enough, the ripples kept spreading until there was nowhere left to go and they ran up against a rock or a lilypad or sometimes her shoes. They looked the way the inside of her head felt when she rapped her knuckles on a piece of sheet metal in her dad's workshop, something that fascinated and inexplicably soothed her in equal measure.
Her dad had been furious when he'd found her, ankle-deep in the sucking muck at the edge, pebbles of various sizes sorted into immaculate little piles at her side. Stupid, he'd said, eyes bulging with terror, mustache trembling and fingers digging into her skin as he shook her. That was stupid. Don't you know it only takes a few inches of water to drown.
—
Asami slips through the airship's hatch and the world closes in on her as it opens, the bubbling ebb and flow of her friends' conversation behind her buried beneath the hollow, metallic thud of her boots on the ramp, the scrape of grit under her heels, the rush of air from her lungs as she sits and stretches her legs out into the encroaching night with a sigh.
They hadn't spent long in the air today; they'd set course for Ba Sing Se after welcoming Kai into the newly reborn Air Nation and leaving his troubled past behind, but once daylight had begun flirting with the horizon, the ever-present rumbles in Bolin's stomach had increased in volume until they became impossible to argue with. Asami—whose own thoughts had been about as far from food as they could get—would've relished the immersive task of flying them straight through the night to their destination, but it was not to be; they'd touched down for the evening several hours southwest of the city, where the deep, dry basin of the Si Wong began to rise into the scrubby foothills that cradled Full Moon Bay.
The rounded ridges of what Jinora said had once been towering mountains were dotted with thorny shrubs and hardy, wind-weathered little trees. They looked eerie in the indigo-washed twilight, Asami thought, trunks twisting skyward as if in some macabre dance and branches reaching out like skeletal hands in the dark.
And dark it was. Even darker than she'd come to expect in the weeks they'd spent searching high and low for new airbenders. Dense clouds—the kind that promised a deluge with a wink and a nudge but never delivered—had thickened in the afternoon, and now the moon and stars, which ordinarily burned so much brighter at the desert's edge than they did against the restless glow of Republic City, lay hidden beneath a deep blue-black spreading across the sky like a fresh bruise.
There would be no starlight tonight.
A sharp peal of laughter from inside the ship pierces the evening hush, and guilt drops like a lead weight low in Asami's belly. She should still be in there with them, laughing at Korra's jokes and Bumi's stories and that vein in Tenzin's left temple that bulged at the slightest provocation. Moments like these were few and far between, now that Future Industries ate up nearly all of her days and many of her nights, and she should be making the most of this time while it lasted, before responsibility once again scattered them like ball bearings flung from a rusted-out engine. And tonight's clock was ticking—from what she'd heard of the Earth Queen, they'd need all the rest they could get ahead of tomorrow, and would likely be turning in for bed soon.
Asami wouldn't be joining them, though. Not on a night like this. She had blueprints to study and designs to tweak and expenses to reconcile and only then—once blue dawn began filtering into the void of night, just before the the first of her friends started to stir—would she let herself doze off, just for a handful of minutes, just long enough to numb the raw throb of exhaustion and get her through the next day. But not long enough to dream. Because if she slept long enough to dream, she'd see her dad, and if she saw her dad—
A bolt of dread strikes her gut, icy and nauseating, curdling the blood in her veins as it rolls outward along her limbs in waves, her mind's eye locking onto the thing that lived just over her shoulder and crept into the periphery of her vision whenever she stopped moving or forgot to keep looking straight ahead. Sweat prickles hot across her brow and immediately cools in the sunless chill and Asami shivers, hand leaping to her thigh and jittery fingers tracing the outline of the letter that's been burning a hole in her pocket for hours, ever since an over-exerted mail courier had pressed it into her hand and panted “Miss Sato? Urgent message from Republic City” while her friends were welcoming Kai onto the ship.
She'd known who had sent it before she'd even looked at the handwriting.
Asami inhales, long and deep and wavering, holding her breath until her head starts to swim and her ears start to ring, unsuccessfully willing her hands to stop shaking as fear and the hot humiliation of losing control over her own body tangle in her throat, each vying to be the first to claw its way out. The paper crinkles and shivers in her clumsy fingers as she tugs at the envelope, and her father's voice fills her skull as she begins to read.
Asami,
I caught a sliver of a meteor shower through the bars of my cell window last night. Time passes strangely in here, so it's difficult to know for certain, but if my calculations are correct it was the same one we watched together when you were four. You, me, and your mother, when we were still a family.
Do you remember how you begged us to let you stay up past your bedtime to see it? We never could say no to you. You almost made it—I think you fell asleep within an hour, give or take, of it starting. We hated to wake you, but we knew how upset you'd be if you missed it, so we wrapped you up in your favorite blanket (that old one you always chewed on, with the turtle ducks, remember?) and we carried you up to the top floor balcony. I'll never forget the awestruck expression on your face when you saw the first one. You looked so small under that big sky, sitting up on your mother's shoulders and watching the lights streak by overhead.
Perhaps we could've watched them together again last night, if you'd chosen differently. At least your mother doesn't have to watch you continue to gallivant about with the people who broke the world and destroyed our family. In time you'll find there's no substitute for blood, and I hope, for your sake, that the lesson doesn't come at too high a cost.
Asami, I need you to understand that everything I ever did, I did for you. I did it for all of us. This remains fact whether you want to accept it or not. If you would just talk to me, I know I could make you see it.
Dad
Asami sucks in another ragged breath and holds it, folds the letter and folds it again, and then again, smaller and smaller, each time pressing the creases flat with a nail, the corners precise enough to measure with in a pinch and sharp enough to draw blood if she wasn't careful. Too quickly, the paper becomes too small and too stiff to keep folding, and she thinks, wildly, that she might start peeling apart the hull of the ship just to weld it back together again, just to give herself a distraction. She digs her thumbnail into the paper until it hurts and looks out into the darkening sky to organize the smattering of stars into their constellations, like she used to do sometimes as a child when plagued by this kind of energy that had nowhere to go but inward. This time of year, the Vermilion Bird's wings should be—
None of the stars are visible. Darkness bleeds into the edges of her vision and her heart throws itself against the inside of her ribcage like a feral creature.
She needs to shut this down while she still can. Her friends are too close and the night is too quiet but she can feel him next to her, around her, right in front of her, see his features twisted into furious, almost theatrically grotesque contortions by the mecha's thick glass and her own imperfect memory, and then he's whipping the metal arm toward her faster than lightning, faster than a thought, faster than an empty apology, and glass shatters across her face and a deafening silence thunders in her ears and panic locks her body and her heart breaks for the 209th time and the pieces scatter and skip out of rhythm—
No. That was a footstep. Movement on the ramp behind her, somebody walking just out of lockstep with the pounding of her pulse, vibrations rattling outward unimpeded through the metal until running ashore against her body.
Three seconds, approximately, to smother the tremors buzzing through her limbs like a swarm of insects had gotten trapped inside her bloodstream. Two seconds to force an arm up to her brow and blot away the sweat with the edge of her sleeve. One second to send out a silent please that the morning's makeup was still somewhat in place and stretch the stiffening muscles of her face into a welcoming smile.
Korra's brow pinches for a fraction of a second when she sees it, like she doesn't quite believe her, but she shoots Asami a grin in return and drops down next to her with a sigh, balancing a small plate of steaming, richly-scented buns on the tips of her fingers.
“Didn't want you to miss dessert,” Korra answers before Asami can ask. “What are you up to out here?”
Her brain, in a last-ditch bid to reestablish control, immediately cobbles together an explanation—she was checking over the ship, looking for loose fastenings, for gaps in the welding and debris caught in the seams, ensuring everything was in working order for the next leg of their journey—but the lie catches behind her teeth and all that comes out is a sharp gasp.
She sucks in another gulp of air, harsh and stuttering, but it's not enough, she can't breathe, she's choking on her own throat—
"Whoa, hey, Asami," Korra says, dropping the plate with a clatter and fluttering her hands like she'd meant to reach out and touch her but had thought better of it.
"I'm sorry," Asami gasps, "I'm sorry," and then she holds her breath, seals her lips into a tight line, tries to physically force the mess back inside her where it belongs.
It doesn't work.
Her lungs expel the air like a sickness, a violent exhalation that comes out like a sob. "I'm sorry," she babbles, dragging in another mouthful of air and holding it again.
"No, no, you don't have to be sorry," Korra reassures her. "Hey, try not to hold your breath like that, it just makes it worse. Try to, uhh—can I—is this ok?" she asks, resting a gentle hand on Asami's shoulder.
She manages a stiff nod as every muscle fights to lock up, and then she shivers, violently, the late summer air somehow unbearably frigid next to the wall of heat that was Korra's body beside her own.
"Inhale for me when I squeeze, ok?" Korra says, her voice at once gentle and unyielding. "Two quick inhales in a row, then you can let it all out."
Fingers press into her shoulder once, twice, and Asami breathes in, in, then out, an unspoken why barely registering beyond her brain as the rest of her body goes rogue.
The sound of her breathing intensifies, after a time, and she belatedly realizes Korra had matched her own breathing to Asami's pace. There's something almost hypnotic in the shared rhythm, and her world expands as it narrows, her vision slowly clearing as the rest of her senses converge on the stuttering rush of air, the dryness in her throat, and the steady heat of Korra's hand on her shoulder, the tips of her fingers five points of stability in a world gone upside down.
She's the first to break rhythm, bumbling through what feels like her very first deep breath, and then she takes another, and another, testing the limits of what her lungs can hold.
"Neat trick," she says after a long moment. The words wobble through her numb lips like a wheel missing a few bolts as she swallows back a potent mix of embarrassment and adrenaline. Nobody had ever witnessed one of her episodes before, and that was by design. She'd been so careful. "I never would've thought to try that. Thank you."
Asami looks over with what she hopes is something at least resembling a smile, and Korra offers her a small one in return. "We can both thank Master Katara for it," she says, adding "She taught it to me after everything that happened with Amon. Comes in handy more often than I want to admit," with a frustration-laced huff of a laugh.
A flush of shame blooms icy-hot across Asami's skin and bile rises to meet it. It must show on her face, because Korra curls inward with a cringe. "Ugh, sorry, did I make things weird?" She tugs awkwardly at the end of a ponytail. "I always end up making things weird."
Asami's heart sinks and her nerves spike again. "No! No, you didn't, it's—" she starts, and before she has a chance to think it through, before her brain catches up with her body, she hands over the letter. Immediately she's possessed by the urge to snatch it back, but it's too late; in the blink of an eye and a brush of Korra's fingers against her still-shaking hand, it's done.
Korra carefully unfolds and smooths out the paper, the grit-scraped and wind-chapped skin of her hands belying the gentle elegance of their movements. Asami watches Korra's face as she reads, tracks the movement of her eyes as they dance across the page, the furrow lodging itself between her eyebrows, the curve of her lips as they drop into a frown.
Her eyes lock on Asami's when she finishes, deep blue and furious as the sea. “What the fuck is this?”
Another wave of sweat rolls across her body and she opens her mouth, unsure what might come out, but Korra doesn't wait for an answer. "It's manipulative, is what it is," she spits. “He doesn't get to do this to you, he doesn't get to try and kill you and then—what? Make you feel sorry for him? Act like you were the one in the wrong?"
She drops her voice to a mocking timbre. "'Perhaps if you had chosen differently' well perhaps he shouldn't have forced you into that choice to begin with.”
Asami bristles instinctually. Despite everything, the reflex to defend her dad remained as automatic and unthinking as a heartbeat. She swallows it back. Both she and Korra knew better than most that her father's talents didn't begin and end with engineering.
"He's trying to get me to visit him," she says to the shrinking line of indigo between earth and sky, her words still unsteady and stilted, and her chest a throbbing mass of exposed nerves. She knew exactly what he was doing. Whether or not he knew what he was doing was an entirely different discussion.
Korra's voice is soft when she replies. "Do you wanna see him?"
Asami pulls the letter from Korra's slackened grip and thumbs over one of the creases she'd made earlier. She'd asked herself that question hundreds of times, and each time at once produced a different answer and no answer at all.
Yes. Desperately. Never again. She wants him moved to a cell without a window where he can't see the sky at all, a thought that makes her insides twist hot with shame the second it forms, and she wants to charm her way into the prison and spring him free. She wants to build a fortress around the memory of him, and she wants to cauterize the part of her brain where it lives.
She wants to return every one of his letters in pieces, and she wants him back in her life, all of him, whatever he'll give her—his stubborn genius and his cloak-and-dagger generosity, the possessive paranoia that had haunted her every step, the threads connecting them so tangled and twisted she sometimes couldn't tell where Hiroshi ended and Asami began, his increasingly volatile moods as she'd aged and started walking around wearing her mother's face, a constant reminder of what he'd lost and what he couldn't let go—because anything was better than being chained to his ghost.
"I don't know," she says, finally, an admission made with roughly the same ease and comfort as pulling a tooth. "I think I just—I just wish he'd stop sending these and let me figure it out."
She realizes her mistake the second she makes it, but it's too late. Korra's frown deepens and Asami's blood turns to ice. No more than a handful of words, half a breath exhaled into the near-dark, but it felt like a betrayal, like she'd flipped a switch over the snarl of viscera binding her to her father and illuminated it for all the world to see.
“‘These?'" Korra prods. "You mean this isn't the first one? How long has he been trying to contact you?”
Asami hesitates, pressing her lips together and staring into nothing until her eyes start to water.
“I got the first one a week after he was sentenced."
Korra's quiet for a moment, and then,
“You never said anything."
Asami drops her gaze down to her lap.
No. She hadn't. If the letters were just letters, just words inked onto paper, maybe she would've. Could've. If they weren't memories so vivid she could almost touch them, if the edges didn't cut straight to the ragged core of grief around which she'd built something shaped like Asami Sato.
A letter was a morning at his side learning how to build a transmission, followed by a game of Pai Sho over lunch and an evening spent flinching at shadows, translating the cadence of footsteps. It was self-defense drills until she was ready to drop, glass ornament called daughter and concealed weapon all in one body. Her father sobbing into her shoulder one moment and icing her out the next. Keeping Future Industries running seamlessly when he wouldn't—couldn't—get out of bed. A single absentminded pass me that wrench, will you, Yasuko, followed by two nauseating days of silence. Countless minutes leaning into a mirror with a tin of powder and a tube of lipstick, analyzing the minutiae of every angle and expression, hearing you smile just like her repeating in her head on a loop, said with the softest affection or in a dead-eyed monotone or spat out like a mouthful of venom, depending.
It was a short fuse that left every other moment feeling that much more precious, a sick twist of logic that dizzied her to think about, and it was the fact that after everything, try as she might, she was incapable of hating him.
The knowledge crawled beneath her skin like an itch she couldn't scratch. She'd loved him and resented him, idolized him and feared him, but she'd never hated him.
Asami clenches her fist and digs her nails into the meat of her palm, hard. "I—I wouldn't even have known where to start," she says, instead of any of that. "Things with him were so complicated. They are so complicated. They have been for a long time."
She swerves and jumps tracks. “There was always so much else going on, anyway...sorting through the mess he left behind, trying to keep the company afloat only to have Varrick steal it right out from under me. And then there was everything with me and you and Mako, and Vaatu, the spirit portals, new airbenders—" she cuts herself off. The sun would be back up in the sky before she finished listing everything that had happened between then and now. "It just didn't seem that important stacked up against everything else."
Korra sighs and leans forward on her elbows. "Yeah, I uhh. I guess it's been pretty much non-stop since we met, huh. But...Asami, you can always come to any of us for anything, whatever you need. You're important to us." she says, and then,
"You're important to me."
Asami chances a sideward glance, and guilt kicks in her belly at the earnest look on Korra's face. Whatever shadowed her wasn't Korra's burden to shoulder. Whatever she carried in the blood wasn't Korra's responsibility to cure.
"You've had more than enough to worry about this past year," she says after a beat. "And—" She bites the inside of her lip until she tastes metal. "—you went through so much because of everything he did, it just wouldn't have been fair. This shouldn't be your mess to clean up, none of it was your fault."
"Well, none of it was your fault, either," Korra nudges back. "You know that, right?"
The words rolled off Korra's tongue so easily and then slammed into a wall somewhere between the idea of Asami and the reality of her. The truth—and everyone knew it—was that Amon never would have gotten as far as he had without her father's cunning and without his money. Without her money.
This remained fact whether she wanted to accept it or not.
The danger was gone now, sure, but the impact rippled on. Rebuilding the city hadn't erased the memories of terror or revived the dead. Restoring people's bending hadn't undone the violation.
She'd learned her father until she'd known him better than she knew herself, until she could read his moods with the speed and accuracy of a scent-mad shirshu, but her focus had been so narrow, so selfishly attuned, that she hadn't noticed the army he'd been building beneath her feet, hadn't seen that his anger hadn't truly eased in the moments she hadn't sensed it—it had just been pointed elsewhere.
She should've seen it coming.
"I should've seen it coming."
"You—no." Korra shakes her head, frowning. "Asami, you did everything you could to stop him, and he almost killed you for it."
The bottom falls out of Asami's gut and she sucks in a sharp breath before terror can rip it away. "I…” she tries in a wavering almost-whisper. She tries again. “I keep letting that moment play out over and over again in my head. I can't even—I can barely close my eyes without seeing it."
"Asami..." Korra starts, and she can't bear the strain of pity in her voice.
"But I miss him," Asami interrupts. Her voice teeters like it wants to break, and she swallows. She thinks her chest might cave in. "That's what I don't—it just makes me crazy. I should be happy he's somewhere he can't hurt anyone anymore, but—I mean, I am, of course I am. But I miss him. Or, I miss a version of him? And I don't know how to stop, I can't make sense of any of it, I can't—I don't know how to square this circle."
She rubs at her eyes, puffy from lack of sleep and unshed tears and days of windblown grit. “I'm just so tired, Korra," she admits. "I can't sleep for days after he sends one of these, and I'm already so tired."
It was gutting, saying something like that out loud. If she couldn't manage something so basic, what use was she to the people she cared about. What was the point of her. Asami's hand clenches involuntarily around the letter, and she feels one of the sweat-damp creases give a little under the pressure.
"I try to sleep," she continues after a moment, "but I can't escape it, I can't control it, I just—I see—"
"Him?"
Asami opens her mouth but nothing comes out. She closes it, opens it again. Her eyes blur with tears and her chest throbs as though it's been flayed, her ribcage cracked open in a silent howl that never stopped. "My mom, too."
The dreams never began the same way. Sometimes she'd be tinkering in her workshop as it existed now, sometimes she'd be back in her childhood bedroom at the estate, reading her favorite storybook or playing with the miniature wooden Satomobile her father had given her. But she'd always be compelled to get up and start walking, dread building in the pit of her stomach with each step, something inside her begging feebly, impotently, for her to stop, to turn back, to wake up, wake up as her legs dragged her inexorably toward the beginning of the end. Eventually, without fail, she'd reach the hallway leading to her mother's study, and sometimes, when she looked down, there was blood on her hands. Sometimes, when she looked down, the charred corpse on the floor was her own.
The dreams never began the same way, but they all had the same ending. Every time, her gaze was pulled up and to the right. Her father towered over her, larger than life—or maybe she was just very small—and then she was back in that warehouse, shards of broken glass raining down over her head as the world ended for the second time. It was a treat to wake after that. On occasion, her mind would keep her under long enough for her father's face, vicious and demented, to turn into her own.
Dread shoots through her once again, electric and paralyzing, flooding her body until she thinks she could burst open under the pressure. Fear sours into shame spoils into nausea testing the confines of her insides on creeping tendrils.
"I should've seen it coming," she repeats. If she'd seen it coming, if she'd had the clarity of mind to look beyond what he'd been and see what he'd become, maybe she could've stopped him.
And maybe, if she'd stopped him, the thing just over her shoulder wouldn't be goading her to finish what he'd started back in that warehouse, because then, at least, she'd finally be free of the memory, the crushing guilt of having been utterly blind to the hateful rot festering within him, the choking fear that it had somehow taken root inside her, too, without her noticing.
"What if I didn't see it coming because I didn't want to," she blurts out, an unauthorized manic note creeping into her voice. "What if whatever made him do it is in me too, what if—"
Her stomach lurches like a cliff's edge had given way under her feet.
"You aren't your father, Asami," Korra cuts in, like a steadying hand reaching out in the dark.
Her voice is unflinching. "You aren't him. You aren't anything like him. If you were, you wouldn't be tying yourself into knots like this."
Korra's eyes shine wide, honest, in the dark. She believes it, even if Asami doesn't. Maybe that was enough. Maybe she could let it be enough, for now.
"Nothing forced him to do what he did, it was a choice he made," Korra insists. "We always have a choice. Maybe we can't always pick the battle, or maybe there aren't a whole lot of options, but there's always a choice. And he made his."
Asami's chest tightens, burns, just below the sternum. "I just don't understand it," she grits out, tears welling up once again. When his world split apart and he'd had to pick between vengeance and everything else, she'd come up short. She hadn't been enough.
Why wasn't I enough.
"I just don't understand it."
"I know, it…” Korra sighs and looks down at her hands. “It never makes sense that your own family could hurt people like that. Hurt you like that," she says, and Asami knows, with a staggering twist of sympathy, that Korra isn't only talking about her father.
She glances over at Asami and then out into the night. "You know, a lot of the time when I dream, I see my uncle. When I wake up after one of those, it's all so fresh and raw. Like it just happened. Like I can actually feel this gaping hole where my past lives are supposed to be." Her voice wavers a bit on the last word, and it's hard to tell in the dark, but she looks like she might cry, too. Asami aches.
"And I know he's gone but it feels like it's not over, you know?” Korra continues. “Like I could turn any corner and he'll be there, or everything that I thought happened after was some kind of trick somehow, and eventually I'll snap out of it for real and the whole world will be in ruins, or—or he set some kind of trap and one day I'm gonna walk right into it."
She rubs a hand over her face. "Everyone expects me to have all the answers, or, like, an instant fix for everything that goes wrong everywhere, but I don't know what I'm doing half the time, and I don't know how I'm supposed to figure it out when I'm missing one of the only parts of myself that really mattered." She sucks in a breath through her teeth. "He took something from me I can't ever get back, and I just haven't felt...right. Since."
It never ceased to bewilder and infuriate Asami that people missed entirely the brilliant mind and fierce heart blazing so brightly through the cracks in Korra's brash exterior. That they saw only the blunt instrument and not the person wielding it.
That they would use her and they would abuse her and then discard her like she meant nothing.
It boiled her blood to think about, and it broke her heart to see Korra internalize it.
Asami reaches out, touches Korra's shoulder. “You're still you, Korra,” she says, the words coming out more than a little hoarse. She knew it to be true like she knew the smell of gasoline, or the feel of a breeze against her skin. She wracks her brain, but she doesn't think she's ever met anyone more unapologetically themselves.
"You're brave and caring, and so funny, and I don't think anyone could ever take that away,” she continues. “And all of us—Bolin, Mako, and I—we're all here because you're our friend, and we care about you, not just because you're the Avatar. Tenzin and Bumi and Jinora, too. I mean, you're basically the big sister Jinora won't admit she's always wanted."
Korra huffs a wet laugh, and her eyes shine like glass. Asami bites her lip on a ragged exhalation. Keeps going. "You didn't have to come looking for me earlier, and you didn't have to sit and stay with me, but you did anyway. That's just who you are.”
Korra releases a shuddering breath and Asami moves her hand, rests it atop one of Korra's. Gives it a squeeze. "You're more than your destiny," she says, and she's never been more certain of anything more in her life. "I don't care what Raiko says. I don't care what anyone says."
Korra's voice is rough when she responds. "I guess making sense of all this is harder—or, it's just different than what happened with Amon. I mean, I knew he was dangerous from the start, but with my uncle, I never thought…I mean, I trusted him. You know?"
"Yes.” Asami's throat strangles the word on its way out as the tears crowding along the rims of her eyes finally spill over. "I know."
Such a strange little miracle it was that even after everything—after Mako, after her dad, after Mako again—Korra still trusted her implicitly and without reservation. That she could show Asami something broken and know that she'd hold it with care.
It was a heavy thing, that kind of faith. Not heavy like the live round of fear and guilt and resentment that had lodged itself between her ribs years ago, but the kind of weight that had curled around her body and sunk into the marrow of her bones and made a home there without her even noticing. The realization makes her feel warm all over, like she'd stepped into a sunbeam.
"You don't have to figure any of this out alone, Korra. All you ever have to do is say the word, and I'll be there," Asami promises. Her voice is still strained, her words still a bit garbled, but the time for embarrassment was a letter and one breakdown ago. "Even if your uncle had destroyed Raava too, I'd be there. Even if it was just you."
Korra sniffs and swipes roughly at her cheeks. "See, this is how I know you're not your dad," she says thickly. Asami glances down at the letter in her lap, but her eyes are too watery and the sky is too dark to make sense of the characters. With her free hand, she fiddles with one of the corners.
They're quiet for a long moment. Her sight may be stumbling and uncertain, but there's the warmth of Korra's hand beneath her own. There, the heavy sound of their breathing, in and out, in and out as they both recalibrate. There, a chorus of bugs singing in the scrub, an audience of tiny chirping lives that would keep their confidence without even needing to be asked.
"Hey." Korra's voice is raw when she breaks the silence, but there's a quirk in her brow and a spark of mischief glittering in her eyes as she turns to Asami. "Wanna burn that thing?"
Grief flashes through her at the words, sharp and staggering, and she tightens her grip around the paper. If Korra hadn't said anything, if she'd never come looking for her tonight, Asami might've kept it folded neatly in her pocket until the corners were worn smooth from her fingers, and until time broke it back down into its base components, ink to soot and paper to plant fiber until it became so much dust ground into the fabric.
If only it was simply the sum of its parts, no more and no less than words on a page. If only she could neuter it somehow, pick and choose the parts that made up the whole, cleave the monster from the man and let the former fall to the wayside like shards of metal from a lathe, commit nothing but the pointed and precise lines of his hand to memory and make them a rose-tinted monument to a different time and a different Hiroshi. A different Asami.
Would that she could.
She sits with the idea for a moment, turning it over in her head, examining it from all angles. It was a rebuke he'd never see, never hear, and it sets her veins abuzz with the particular tenor of adrenaline unique to stepping out of line and not getting caught. She feels a bit like she’s 16 again, whipping around the tight curves of the narrow, rutted mountain roads outside the city on her dad's favorite motorcycle long after he'd gone to bed one night, just to see if she could get away with it.
Just to see what he'd do if she couldn't.
She swallows. Nods her head, and Korra grins. With trembling fingers Asami smooths the creases from the letter and holds it out face up, gives the distinctive slant of his characters one last look. Korra rests her arm over Asami's and shoots out a restrained curl of flame, and smoke undulates up into the night as the paper catches and the little circle of fire eats away at its heart.
This close, she thinks she finally understands what some benders mean when they describe their element as an extension of the self. The flame looks like just another part of Korra's body, propelled by her breath along an invisible line that started somewhere deep inside her and ended at the twisting spirals of smoke tumbling over themselves as they faded into the dark. When she relaxes her eyes until they unfocus, it almost looks like the fire is coming from both of them.
Asami's never been ashamed of being a nonbender—these days, especially, it was a very deliberately neutral fact of existence. In a world that often felt just slightly off-center and left her feeling as though she was experiencing it from the sidelines, she'd learned to make the most of her creativity and resourcefulness, and she loved—with a fierce, wild joy—how she could make a machine come to life under her hands. She wouldn't trade that for anything.
But she can't help but wonder what it feels like.
She turns to Korra, searching for clues, and she looks—alive. Flames dance in her eyes like starlit waves on the ocean, and when she cocks her head and flashes Asami a crooked little smile, she thinks she can feel it singing in her blood.
The letter burns like the sun rising, like spring leaves unfurling, like falling in love: slowly and then all at once. In a blink the orange ring of flame eating away at the center engulfs the entire sheet, and they both reel back in synchrony as they drop the paper and it falls to the ground, their exhilarated laughter ringing through the night air.
Asami tracks an ember torn loose from the conflagration as it rides an invisible current of warmth up and up and up in a haphazard zigzag, until blazing orange flickers and fades into ashen black and vanishes into the night sky. Something unclenches inside her when it disappears, and exhaustion hits her like a runaway train.
She leans back onto her elbows and stretches out, her muscles tight from nervous strain. Korra moves to follow her, and there's a clink as her boot collides with the plate of buns. "Ha, I forgot all about these," she says, reaching down to grab them and warming them with a quick burst of flame to the underside of the plate. "Wanna try one? Bolin and Kai made ‘em."
Asami smiles but shakes her head. She's got a sneaking suspicion she wouldn't be able to keep anything down at the moment, and that's one hypothesis she has no interest in testing.
Korra nods. "Bolin's very excited about being 'big bro,' she says. "Think it's giving Mako some kind of identity crisis."
"Oh, I can imagine," Asami laughs. Korra snickers and pops one of the buns into her mouth and immediately gags, her face screwing up in disgust.
"Ogh nough," Korra coughs wetly around the dessert. "Og deesh are nah goob.”
Another laugh bursts up out of her, bright and sharp and surprised this time. She hadn't laughed like that since—well, since Korra had dangled Mako in the air like one of Naga's chew toys earlier today. "Are they really that bad?" she asks, unable to keep her face from splitting into a loopy sort of smile.
Korra shudders and swallows heroically, and then "yeah, they for sure swapped out the sugar for salt in the custard," she rasps, eyes glassy. “And I think the eggs were already salted.”
She holds the plate out to Asami. "Try this other one, tell me I'm not crazy."
Asami shakes her head again. "I'll take your word for it," she says with another laugh. "Although I can't say I'm not tempted, you really did a fantastic job selling them."
Korra chuckles and with a wave of her hand raises a small pillar of stone from the earth at their feet. She plops the second bun in the hole, seals it up tight within the rock, and turns to Asami, raising a silencing finger to her lips. Asami titters.
Korra clears her throat. "I gotta—" she pauses for a grimace and a full-body shudder. "—yeah, I gotta find something to help wash that down. Wanna head back in with me?"
Asami looks out into the dark, squinting at the smear of ash on the ground. It looks like a scar on the earth, or like something dead. She's struck by the unsettling thought that if she got close enough, the space surrounding it would feel as cold as the air in a tomb. Tomorrow they'd leave this particular patch of earth behind, and barring some incredible twist of fate, they'd never return.
She's glad for it, she thinks.
Asami turns to Korra with a nod and a slight tightness in her throat. "I think I'm ready," she says, and together they walk side by side up into the warm light of the ship.
Mako and Bolin pop their heads out of the tiny kitchen at the sound of their footsteps as they trundle in. "Ahh! The Avatar has come aboard!" Bolin simpers, arms outspread and dripping soap suds onto the floor. "I'm not washing that one," he adds, pointing to the plate in Korra's hand and she snorts, flashing him a rude gesture.
"Bo, you're getting water everywhere," Mako chides before looking to them. His eyebrows are working overtime, scrunched together so tightly they're practically touching. "What were you two doing out there?"
"Oh! Uhh..." Korra starts.
"Just looking over the ship to make sure it's all set for tomorrow's flight," Asami finishes with a smile, and Korra's answering grin shines brighter than all the stars she couldn't see.
—
Asami settles down at the large table at the heart of the ship, a pot of tea by her elbow and the entirety of Republic City spread out before her on paper.
The city had become an ungainly creature as of late, like all things did when experiencing growing pains. There had to be a total infrastructure remodel to accommodate the spirit vines and streamline the changes in traffic, and the streets themselves were in desperate need of a universal upgrade—even if every other sense were dulled, a person could roughly guess the median income of a neighborhood simply by the feel of the road beneath them.
Years of short-sighted, patchwork redesigns had also left many communities on the outskirts cut off from the center, and the result was a city that was simultaneously busier and lonelier than ever before. Luckily, Asami was nothing if not a well of ideas, and she had plans to fix it. If she really buckled down, she could have them completed and polished enough to present to the President once they all returned from Ba Sing Se.
Time passes slowly as she works, or maybe she just works quickly. In either case, there's still hours to go before dawn by the time she's put the finishing touches on her designs. Now—now she just has to figure out how to pay for it. And where to source the raw materials. And the logistics of transporting said materials to the city. And an information campaign that anticipated any potential question or complaint a citizen might have without boring or overwhelming anyone. And a detailed timeline and a workforce and compensation for the workforce and an emergency fund in case something went wrong (and something always went wrong) and, and, and.
Asami leans back in her chair, stifling a yawn and rubbing her eyes. Even the tiny muscles around the sockets were sore as they protested the strain of work yet resisted the pull of sleep. She should get up, stretch her legs, get her blood moving for one final push. Any second now she'll get up, stretch her legs, get her blood moving.
Her subconscious wakes to a panoptic night sky, a sea of tiny fires burning against endless velvety black.
A brief moment of vertigo, and then she finds a horizon—but just barely. It's the Silver River that gives it away, glittering so brightly she thinks she can almost feel the heat of it, the great engine of the universe perfectly reflected onto an expanse of water so still it might as well have been made of glass.
Her dad isn't here. She can feel it.
There's no shoreline until, in the manner of dream unlogic, there is one. She drops into a crouch and reaches out. The water is warm to the touch, and she thinks—no, she knows—that she could float in it without treading. That it would just hold her. Asami plucks a pebble from the shore, and when she tosses it into the Silver River the galaxy's reflection fractures, scattering like a spray of diamonds. She watches the ripples spread until they're consumed by the still water, and then she trails her fingers along the surface, gentle as a whisper.
It shivers under her touch.
Asami stands, slips off her shoes, and walks in.