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i.
She tries to sleep, but every time she shuts her eyes, the image of Kuvira's massive mecha-suit comes unbidden to the front of her mind, hulking, terrifyingly human and inhuman at the same time. She imagines where it is right now, somewhere not far from here, no doubt. Its death march to Republic City is on its final leg; tomorrow, it'll be on their doorstep.
Something about the mecha-suit in particular makes Asami's stomach turn. All the villains she's faced, all the monsters and battles, and somehow Kuvira's cannon-armed giant is the one that has her tossing and turning in her borrowed bed. After a few hours she sits up and pushes the blanket away, craning her neck to look out the porthole-shaped window by the bed. She can see a good chunk of Air Temple Island from here, dark and still in the night. She almost lies back down before she notices a figure standing at the edge of one of the training courtyards, facing out towards Yue Bay, eerily close to the cliffside.
Her first thought is panicked—an Earth Empire spy? She wouldn't put it past Kuvira to send a strike squad in the dead of night. But her eyes adjust to the darkness the longer she stares, and then familiar details start to emerge—the curve of a back she would know anywhere, the fine edge of shoulder-length hair.
There's hardly a question of what to do next in her mind. Asami gets out of bed and goes out into the hallway in only her nightgown and slippers. It's just a little too cold out for so little clothing—autumn is coming, rolling into the city off the bay, and she feels a violent shiver run down her spine as soon as she steps out of the women's dormitory. The courtyard lies below her at the bottom of a steep stone staircase. She makes no attempt to mask her footsteps as she descends, but Korra doesn't turn around. She's standing at the very edge of the courtyard, close enough to pitch over the cliff with one good step forward. A powerful instinct that Asami doesn't recognize compels her to reach out and pull Korra back.
"Hey. What are you doing up?" Korra blinks at her, face blank. She looks like she was lost in thought before; Asami guesses that she's not the only one thinking about gargantuan mecha-suits tonight.
"I could ask you the same thing," Asami says, drawing the nightgown closer to herself. There's a vicious chill coming off the water, more pronounced here on the cliffside than it was by the dormitories. She pauses to take in the view. From here, she can see the skyline of Republic City from end to end, a sight that used to comfort her. Now, it unnerves her. A beat later, she realizes—the whole city's gone dark. She can't see so much as a headlight drifting down the street. If any citizens are left there, they're doing their best to lay low.
"I just couldn't sleep," Korra says. She's still dressed in the clothes she was wearing before they all said goodnight, apparently never bothering to go through the motions of finding a pair of pajamas.
"What's wrong?"
"There's just . . . a lot to think about," Korra hedges, her fingers worrying the top of her glove. "It's been a while since my last big battle. I'm just thinking about what I have to do."
Her voice is strange, off-color. What I have to do. A chill runs down Asami's spine again, this time not from the cold, but from a sudden realization. The rigid set in Korra's spine, her subdued tone, the way she's drinking in the view of the city like it's the last time she'll ever see it. The anxiety Asami felt earlier pales; a different kind of fear is brewing in the pit of her chest.
"I have to ask you something," Asami says, before she can stop herself. The image of the mecha-suit is creeping up in front of her eyes again, superimposed over the calm water of the bay like a bad mover. She can't bring herself to look at Korra. "And you have to tell me the truth."
It's so quiet that she can hear Korra swallow nervously beside her. "Okay."
"Tomorrow, during the fight," she begins, slowly, because the words feel infinitely important, "if it comes to it—if it gets bad, I mean—and you're put in a position like you were with the Red Lotus, where you have to sacrifice yourself for everyone—are you going to do it?"
The silence tells Asami everything she needs to know. Something like rage courses through her, heavy like falling water, hot like metal, and all it takes is Korra saying "Asami..." in a weak, apologetic voice for her to lose her last shred of composure.
"No," she snaps. Her voice is so hard and loud in the silence that both of them wince. She forges on anyway, turning now to face Korra. It gives her no pleasure to see Korra shrink ever-so-slightly away from her, completely disarmed by her anger, but she has never needed to be understood as badly as she does in this moment. "You don't get to do that. Not again."
"Asami," she tries again, her eyes falling to the concrete. "I don't want for that to happen, either. And I'll be careful. But if it comes to that—"
"I don't care if it comes to that. I'm saying no."
Korra meets her gaze, a pleading look in her eyes—but if she's looking for permission, she won't find it here. "This is my job. If Kuvira's killing people, if she's destroying the city, then—"
"I don't give a damn about the city," Asami interjects, so seriously that Korra stops talking, mouth falling a little slack. "I built the city, Korra. I'll build it again. I'll build it a hundred times if I have to. But I can't put you back together."
She doesn't know that she's crying until Korra reaches up and brushes a tear away. Her eyes sting and she wants nothing more than to shut them, to lean into the soft, warm palm against her cheek, but she's not done yet. There's so much more to say, so much that she's held inside for weeks, months, years. And if tomorrow is the end, when else can she say it but now?
"You were gone," Asami says, not looking away, even though the tears in her eyes make Korra's concerned expression swim in her vision. "Three years, you were gone. And you already want to run off again. No. I'm saying no."
"You know, I didn't mean to be gone that long." Korra pulls her hand away, letting it fall shamefully to her side. Somewhere below them, a wave crashes hard against the cliffside. "I never meant to hurt you. I wanted to come back, I just—"
"That's not the point, Korra." Asami's voice is thick with tears, but it doesn't waver. "I'm not upset that you were gone. I know you had to leave. And I'm glad you're better. But I just got you back. You think I'm going to give you my blessing to get yourself killed?"
"What about our friends?" Korra tries, a desperate edge in her voice. "Mako, Bolin, the airbenders, Lin—what about them? I'm supposed to just stand by and let people die, even if I can end it?"
"What about me?"
She doesn't mean for it to come out like that, harsh, anguished, but when it does, her words hang between them like a cannon blast, like a bomb from an Equalist biplane. She doesn't feel cold anymore. Korra's struck silent again, staring at her with an unreadable expression.
"Asami—"
"No. I mean it. What about me?" The tears have stopped falling but her eyes still burn. "Do you know what I did those three years that you were away?"
"No."
"I waited for you to come back."
It's such a simple admission, but they both understand the weight of it, the underlying implication. She continues through the tightness in her throat. "I waited. Even when Mako and Bolin were there, still, I was just waiting for you. Future Industries, the estate, all my little projects and inventions—they were all just distractions. I don't have anything else. I didn't know until you went away, but I know now. I lost my mother a long time ago. Things might never be right again with my father. You're all I have left, Korra."
They're quiet again. Still she cannot decipher the look on Korra's face—her eyes are clouded, not with tears, but some dark, heavy thought, something private and burdensome. Despite herself, Asami steels herself for the worst. Here comes what always does—sorry, goodbye. Today she puts it all on the line, like she always has, and it isn't enough, as it never has been; tomorrow she'll be alone once again.
She wonders if this has happened before, a thousand times before—a stupid, normal, painfully mortal girl like her, asking the spirit of balance to turn their back on the world, to give up their duty to every living creature. To be selfish. Is this what it means to love the Avatar? Asking for a wish that could never be granted, making a fool of one's self?
But Korra's face softens, almost imperceptible in the low light of the moon, and despite herself again, Asami has to swallow back the swell of hope she feels in her throat.
"Okay," Korra says. "I promise."
Korra says it plainly, like it's a simple thing, and Asami can't speak because it isn't simple at all.
She would bet everything she has that what she asked has been asked a thousand times, to a thousand Avatars. And she feels in a very real and carnal part of herself that here, now, is the first time in the long, brutal history of Raava's spirit that the answer is yes.
"Really?" Her voice is breathless; she feels just the very tips of her fingers begin to tremble, as if they know that she needs to grab hold of what Korra's offering and never let it go.
"Really," Korra echoes. She doesn't smile, but she doesn't have to. Her expression is soft, her voice warm, and when she closes the distance between them, it's slow, assured, like they have all the time in the world. Asami wants to believe her more than she's ever wanted anything. She shuts her eyes and wills herself to feel everything as much as she can—the arm around her midsection, holding them close together; the fingers threaded gently in her hair. She breathes in and smells soap, sea salt. Skin.
"Tell you what." Korra pulls away to look at her, a small, mournful smile on her lips. "Tomorrow, when everything is over, let's meet somewhere. No matter what. Just the two of us."
"Fine," Asami says, a muted grin pulling at the corner of her mouth, too. "Where should we go?"
Korra considers this, turning her head to look out at the dark skyline of Republic City. "City Hall."
"Where we first met."
"I was hoping you wouldn't remember that," Korra laughs. "I don't think I made a good first impression."
Asami smiles fully now, and for a moment everything feels weightless. She takes Korra's hand. "How could I possibly forget?"
ii.
All that morning, Asami's thoughts drift back to their conversation, the mecca of City Hall, the promise of reunion. She does not allow herself to imagine Korra not making it there with her.
As it turns out, once the giant falls and the dust settles, Asami is the one who doesn't make it.
She distantly remembers their agreement, but the memory feels far away, like a ship far off in a foggy bay. She can't summon the mental strength to bring it any closer than that. She's on her knees in a mass of rubble. The street is silent but for the sound of her own hands, pulling desperately at pieces of rock and metal. The only light she has to go by is from the new spirit portal cleaving a hole in the sky, a few blocks away from where she is now, casting a sickly yellow glow over the ruined street.
How did she get here? Her last concrete memory is seeing Korra walk through the spirit portal with Kuvira's arm around her shoulders, and a feeling of relief so intense that Asami's knees nearly buckled. But after that the thread starts to unravel. She vaguely remembers Kuvira calling her soldiers off. She remembers putting her hand on Korra's shoulder, just once, just to feel that she was real, that it was not a trick of her mind. And then there was a mess of voices and hands, pulling them in every direction—Korra was tugged away by Tenzin and Raiko, and Asami was led by the arm to a healing tent (she did not know that there was a nasty gash in her upper arm until the healer began to run cooling waters over it). When she came out of the tent she couldn't recognize anyone around her.
It was like a curtain fell in her mind. Asami took one look at the spirit portal and instantly, it all came back to her—the hummingbird suit, her father's hand on the eject button, his last words. The raw power of the giant's hand smashing the life out of him. The curious feeling of floating inches away from her own death, suspended in the air for what felt like an eternity.
She had managed to shut it all out while she was searching for Korra in the ruins, but once the threat was gone and her friends were safe, the reality of Hiroshi's death hit her as hard as that giant's hand. In a stupor, she wandered away from the site of the new portal, shrugging easily past scattered friends. She picked a direction and began to walk.
She only knew she was in the right place when she found the bridge where Korra had frozen the mecha-suit. Miraculously, the quaint little bridge survived unscathed; she crossed it slowly, feeling as if her body was getting heavier with every step, like she might fall straight through it and into the canal below. But she, too, came away unscathed.
Now she's on her hands and knees in the wreckage, at the spot where she thinks she saw the carcass of the hummingbird suit fall to the cracked asphalt, but it's far from an exact coordinate. She tries to remember the exact moment that the giant's hand came away but finds that she can't; all she can see now is a sickening loop of her father being crushed, every time she closes her eyes, even just to blink. The hand, the sound of metal squealing, the wind rushing in her ears. Over and over.
She doesn't know how long she digs in the rubble before Korra finds her. Any thoughts of City Hall are far from her now. All she knows is that one minute she is alone, elbow-deep in a pile of twisted metal, and the next minute Korra is beside her, her strong hands around Asami's wrists, dragging her hands out of the debris.
"You're bleeding," is all Korra says. Not, What are you doing? What are you looking for? Asami isn't sure why but she's grateful for this. She looks down at her palms. Both are slashed open, the scattered wounds caked in dried blood.
"Oh."
"Hang on." Korra leaves her side for an indefinite amount of time—for the life of her Asami cannot figure out if minutes are passing or hours—and returns with a glob of water suspended between her hands. She must have gone back to the bridge, back to the very canal that had stopped Kuvira, for a time. Not enough time.
"Hold still," Korra says. She bends the water onto Asami's hands and then takes them in her own. Instantly, the water between their palms begins to glow with healing properties, and Asami thinks that it should feel good, though admittedly, she is struggling to feel anything at all.
After a long silence, Asami grounds herself enough to speak. "I'm sorry."
"What for?"
"I stood you up." The promise to meet at City Hall finally comes back to her now, watching Korra run her thumbs over the tiny cuts littering her hands.
"It's okay." Korra draws some of the water away. It's flecked with blood. "I'm sorry, too."
"Why?"
"I broke my promise," she says, and Asami hates the way Korra's voice sounds—tired, raspy—because it reminds her terribly of how Korra sounded after the Red Lotus fight three years before, like a shell of herself. "I almost got myself killed."
"It's okay." Asami looks down at their hands and for the first time feels the calm, strong way that Korra's fingers have wrapped around hers. "I'm just glad you're still here."
It's a loaded statement. She can tell from the corner of her vision that Korra is looking at her now, searching her face for something.
"I am so, so sorry about your father, Asami," she says. "He saved us all today."
Asami looks up and sees her own reflection drifting in Korra's eyes and something about this makes every nerve in her body go slack, like piano wire pulled so taut that it snaps; she looks at herself and doesn't recognize one inch of her face. She doesn't feel herself pitch forward and land hard against Korra's chest, or feel Korra's arms around her, or feel the tears tracking through the soot on her cheeks, or anything, really. The reality of the situation strikes her very hard, all at once. She's kneeling on nothing. Hiroshi Sato's body was crushed beyond recognition. Whatever she was hoping to find in the aftermath, whatever morbid scrap of closure, doesn't exist.
There is nothing here but a wide, empty street, a blanket of wreckage. But for once she is not alone.
iii.
By the time she's pulled herself together, and they've made the long, quiet walk back to the Sato estate, it's nearly dawn.
"This way," Asami says, and she is not sure if she reaches for Korra's hand or Korra reaches for hers, but when she looks down, their fingers are intertwined.
She leads the way to the garden behind the mansion. It had been her mother's pride and joy, a lifetime ago—even now, when she tries to picture her mother's face, she imagines her in her garden, kneeling beside her rosebushes. The garden doesn't have nearly the same charm anymore; her father hired gardeners for years to keep it presentable, but the loving touch was lost. In the years since his imprisonment, Asami did her best to maintain it on her own, but she's never had much of a green thumb. Dead rose petals begin to collect under their feet as they walk deeper into the garden.
"Here?" Korra asks.
"Here."
They're standing in the far, northernmost corner of the garden, under the shade of a massive black pine tree. It distantly occurs to Asami that Korra has never seen this particular part of the estate, with good reason.
At the base of the tree is a row of three marble slabs. Asami kneels down in front of them, as she's done hundreds of times before, and rests her hand on the center slab. The tips of her fingers brush against her mother's name. Eventually, she draws her eyes to the leftmost stone, engraved with her father's name and birthdate. She numbly wonders how long it will take to have an engraver come out and carve in his death date.
Korra is staring at the rightmost slab: Asami Sato. 152 A.G. -. Her face is clouded.
"Why didn't you ever mention this?"
"This used to be a place where I could be alone." Asami pulls her hands back and rests them both in her lap. "My father could never stand to be here, after mom died. He used to say he'd be here when he was dead, anyway."
At this, her voice fails. A life's worth of memories are fighting to the front of her mind, all clamoring for center stage. She thinks of the last time she saw her parents together—the night her mother died. There'd been a party at the manor, an event with all of her father's business partners and colleagues. (Later, much later, it was determined that this was how the killer entered the estate—it was easy work, slipping through the commotion of a hundred-odd party guests, and from there all the firebender had to do was wait upstairs in her parents' bedroom. He'd been lying in wait for them both; as it turned out, only her mother came up to bed that night.)
That very last memory, a memory that Asami has held close to her heart for most of her life now, is picture-perfect: her mother and father, standing together at the head of the parlor, each holding a drink, laughing. Her father's hand around her waist; her mother's head on his shoulder. They'd been surrounded by a half-circle of adoring friends. The lights were low and warm. The phonograph sang invitingly on the mantle. Her mother had caught her gaze in the crowd of people and laughed again, this time dotingly, and said, "What are you still doing up, darling?" The maid appeared at her elbow. Within seconds she was ushered upstairs to her room.
"Asami?"
She breaks out of the stupor of memory and finds Korra looking at her closely, her fingertips just barely touching the small of her back.
"Sorry," Asami says. "I always imagined this differently."
"How?"
"I thought I'd be older, for one." She's still young, she has to remind herself, though she doesn't feel it anymore. "And . . . I thought I'd be alone."
Korra's hand goes still against her back.
"For a long time, my father was all I had," she continues numbly. "I thought that when he died, that would be it. I would be the last one standing. No one left."
"Asami—"
"But you're here."
A troubled look passes over Korra's face—she's starting to know that look all too well. Heavy, serious. But when it passes, she looks so peaceful, so youthful, that Asami could cry just looking at her.
"I'm here."
The sun is halfway over the horizon now, and when the first good ray of light hits her eyes they ache like wounds. She shuts them; she just wants to feel again, like she did last night on the cliff.
"And you won't leave again?"
For a tender moment nothing happens, but this time, for the first time, she is not bracing for the worse. She feels arms around her neck, a kiss pressed against her cheek, and it's as terribly clumsy as it is terribly loving. Korra doesn't answer her—because what could be a better answer, a stronger promise? They've run out of good words, anyway. Instead, there is touch—hands so tight, they could break her and she would thank them. The feather-light seal of lips against her cheek, her jaw, the very corner of her mouth.
Eventually the sun comes all the way up; the harsh light of morning hits her face hard, but Asami keeps her eyes shut for as long as she can. In the daytime, she knows, there will be complications, action, people. She thinks that the two of them are due for a talk, too. But for now, she can keep her eyes closed, rest her head on Korra's shoulder. For now, this can be enough; after all is said and done, it's more than she's ever had.