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The sun is in her eyes again.
Su sighs, rising and walking to her suite’s picture window, her hands leaving prints in the dust on the sill. On the horizon, the late afternoon sunlight cuts across the sky, knifing through the fallen buildings’ empty spaces. The gaps dominate the skyline, jagged and uneven, and she hears a distant crack as debris crumbles off the ruined structures to litter the streets below.
She pulls the window shade closed, and her jaw clenches tight.
Scattered papers cover her desk in barely organized chaos that almost reflects the scene outside, each page filled with thick columns of legal jargon—case plans, attorney profiles, the copy of Baatar Junior’s arrest record that Lin grudgingly slipped her after some gentle persuasion. She reaches down to straighten the piles, the motions occupying her hands but doing little to distract her mind.
A knock at the door does the trick, tugging her from her reverie, and she crosses the room to undo the latch and peer outside.
“Korra!” She pulls the door open wider, a smile crossing her face for the first time in what feels like weeks. “Please, come in. It’s good to see you.”
“Hello, Su,” the Avatar returns the greeting, ducking through the door and flashing her crooked grin. “Sorry for dropping in unannounced. I haven’t been back in the city long, but I wanted to come by and see how you’re doing. I heard you’re staying here for a while?”
“For another week or so, yes. Possibly longer.” Su waves a hand at the clutter on the desk. “It’ll still be a while before Baatar Junior’s first hearing, but I’m preparing as much as I can, researching the best possible advocate to take his case. Plus, I wanted to stay in the city so I can visit him while—while he’s being held.” She feels her smile slipping at the edges, pain filling all the new lines in her face. “I won’t lie, it’s been difficult these past few weeks. It’s as though I finally have my son back, only to be on the brink of losing him again.”
“Yeah. I can only imagine.” Korra steps forward to envelop her in a hug, impulsive but welcome, her voice layered with sympathy. “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” she adds as she pulls back. “Well, sort of.”
“‘Sort of’?” Su raises an eyebrow, smiling in spite of herself. She doesn’t feel the first flicker of unease until Korra takes a visibly deep breath.
“I went to see Kuvira the other day,” she says, peering up to meet Su’s eyes, her expression somewhere between expectation and guarded apprehension.
Su feels her posture stiffening, the warmth from the hug already slipping away. Her face settles into a cool mask. “Did you?”
Korra nods. “She told me I was the first person to come see her since she was locked up. And, well…I was actually a little surprised that you haven’t been to visit her.”
“Is that so? And why would that be surprising?” Su narrows her eyes and crosses her arms, and the metal on her wrists prickles through her sleeves, cold and sharp as the memory of Kuvira’s face.
“Back in Zaofu, you told me she was like a daughter to you.” Korra’s eyes dart sideways, her words slowing, hesitance beginning to replace the warmth in her tone. “And I know how important family is to you. I thought…”
She trails off, catching sight of Su’s face. “Or not?”
“Of course family is important to me.” Su makes an effort to smooth her expression, hoping it looks more carefree than it feels. “But let’s just say some wounds are easier to heal than others. You know Kuvira’s crimes as well as I do.”
The anger flares back up without her permission, scalding and sudden like an unwatched pot boiling over, and she gestures at the shuttered window. “Just take a look at the city,” she spits out. “Every time I look outside at all that devastation, I see Kuvira. Why would I need to go visit her when her handiwork is right here, all around me?”
“Believe me, I understand,” Korra says, but though the words ring true, her face is troubled. “And I’m not trying to excuse anything she did. But…who was it that created the weapon? And that enormous mech?”
Su frowns, her arms tightening over her chest. The metal wrist plates dig a little deeper. “Kuvira.”
“You know that’s not exactly true.” Korra shakes her head. “It was Baatar Junior. It was your son.”
“Because she brainwashed him.” Su hears her own voice rising, probably piercing through the hotel’s thin walls, but she can’t bring herself to care. “He was a naïve and inexperienced young man, and she exploited that. She took advantage of his feelings for her. And besides, it’s not as though he was the one pulling the trigger. Kuvira did that all on her own.”
“But she wouldn’t have had the weapon if he hadn’t built it for her,” Korra presses. “Regardless of whether he did it for love or for whatever other reason, he still did it. She couldn’t have caused all that destruction without him.”
“Listen to what you’re saying, Korra.” The anger surges forward, and for a moment it’s like she’s stepped back into the shoes of a brash and volatile girl, cornered on the street with her sister’s cables wrapped around her wrist. “If a robber breaks into a house and stabs someone with a kitchen knife, is the knife’s manufacturer responsible?”
“It’s not the same.” Korra crosses her arms, her posture mirroring Su’s defiance. “He was with her every step of the way for three years. When we captured him, you saw how quick he was to stand up for the ‘Earth Empire.’ I know he’s your son and you love him, but he’s no less guilty than Kuvira. I’m just wondering, if she really was like a daughter to you, why you’re so willing to forgive him and not her.”
She takes a deep breath, pressing her lips together. “Look, after Kuvira’s weapon went haywire and she and I got thrown into the spirit world, we had a long talk before we returned to the physical world, and I think it helped us both see each other in a different light. Like I said, I’m not defending anything she did. Her actions were wrong—you and I know it, she knows it, everyone knows it. But despite all that…I can see a lot of myself in her. And I know you see yourself in her, too, because you told me so back in Zaofu. So I keep thinking, if she’s just a monster who’s not worth saving, what does that say about you and me?”
“Avatar Korra.” Su draws herself up, as though she can somehow drive the brittle tone from her voice by standing taller. It doesn’t work. “You know I have great respect for you, but my family business is just that—family business.”
For a moment Korra looks ready to argue, her mouth twisting like she’s taken a bite of bad cabbage, but instead she nods. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m not here to force a reconciliation. I learned my lesson when I tried that with Lin and Opal.” She gives a rueful smirk that fades into something more contemplative. “But I still wanted to make the suggestion.”
Tension creeps over Su’s temples and thrums behind her eyes, the telltale signs of the oncoming headaches that seem more and more common these days. She presses her fingers to the corners of her eyes, holding back a sigh. “What suggestion?”
“Just go see her.” Korra’s voice fills with quiet conviction. “I’m not asking you to forgive her. Just…talk. I think it would be helpful for both of you.”
She straightens and squares her shoulders before bending at the waist in a quick bow. “Anyway,” she says. “I’ve taken up enough of your time. Good luck with everything, Su.”
She gives one more smile and walks out the door, leaving the echo of her words behind her.
The interior of Republic City’s prison visiting area is the closest thing Su has to a second home—or so it feels, anyway, given the number of times she’s passed through its doors. She rests her folded hands on the table and waits, staring down at the peaks and valleys of her twined fingers and knuckles. Anything to avoid another examination of the bleak gray-paneled walls, the gray-tiled floor, the gray-suited guards stationed in every corner and glaring into the distance.
She doesn’t look up until she hears the opening and closing of the door and the shuffle of hobbled feet, followed by the harsh scrape of chair legs across the floor.
“Mother,” Baatar Junior says. He settles into the chair across the table from her, and it creaks under his weight—though not as much as it used to, she notices.
Used to, she thinks, a bitter edge sharpening the words in her mind, like the rasp of steel on stone. Has it already been that long?
“If you came for news, I’m afraid there isn’t much to tell,” her son is saying, and she forces her mind back to the present. “It’s still almost unbearably dull. I’m still being treated well enough. The food is still…edible. Sort of.”
“I know, sweetie,” she says, the words almost automatic. She breathes in deep, flattens her hands on the table. “That’s actually not why I came today, though.”
Baatar blinks at her, then reaches up to adjust his glasses. The thick rectangular frames make his face look too pinched, his eyes too small, and not for the first time Su wonders if she picked them out for him.
She hates that she can no longer look at her son without thinking of Kuvira.
“Mother?” Baatar says again, and wets his chapped lips. His voice sounds thick with disuse, and dark stubble coats his face. She doesn’t say it, but it makes him look all the more like his father. “Is everything all right? You seem more preoccupied than usual.”
“Everything is fine.” Su slips into the same gentle tone she once used for telling bedtime stories and soothing away the aches from scraped knees. “I just…I know we’ve talked about this before, but I need you to tell me why you left Zaofu. Why you…did everything you did.”
“Again?” Baatar’s face wrinkles in confusion, and his glasses slip down his nose. “Mom…”
“Please.” She reaches out to grip his hands, and his fingers are cold, so cold. “Tell me Kuvira convinced you to do it. She made you promises. She agreed to marry you. She knew what it would take to keep you happy and agreeing with her plans.”
“They were our plans, Mother.” Baatar’s fingers flex in her grip, but he doesn’t pull away. “I know you want me to say Kuvira manipulated me into all of it, but I can’t tell you that. It isn’t true.”
“Baatar, you don’t need to protect her. You can’t possibly still have feelings for her, after—”
This time he yanks his hands away, and pain etches across his face, fine and sharp as the stab of a needle. “Mother,” he says, voice low and grating. “I appreciate everything you’re doing for me, I really do, but you still don’t get it. This isn’t about Kuvira. It’s about me.”
He braces his elbows on the table and lowers his head into his hands, straining around the cuffs on his wrists. “Why is it that no matter what, you refuse to see I’m capable of my own convictions? Back in Zaofu, you saw me as an extension of Dad. Now, you see me as an extension of Kuvira. Why is it so hard to believe that I have a mind of my own?”
“Honey, of course I know you have a mind of your own.” The urge to jump up and pace around the table is strong; the desire to make another desperate grab for his hands is even stronger. She ignores both. “But I’m your mother. How can I believe the little boy I raised is capable of—of all this? The death, the destruction? Republic City will never be the same. You know that, don’t you? ”
Baatar lifts his head, and his eyes are red-rimmed. “I know it went too far,” he says. “Much too far. But believe me when I say we never intended it to come to this. All we wanted was to take back what was ours and then defend it. And—Mother, I can’t even describe how it felt when I saw that mech complete and operational for the first time. Something I’d spent years of my life planning and designing. All the long nights brainstorming and troubleshooting and making endless concepts and models—”
He breaks off, taking a long, shuddering breath. “For the first time in my life, I felt like I had purpose, like I was doing something meaningful. I can only imagine it must be the same way you felt when you and Father built Zaofu.”
Su rocks back in her chair, planting her hands on the edge of the table, gripping as hard as she can to hide their shaking. “How can you even compare Zaofu to that—that thing? Your father and I built a city dedicated to progress and freedom. You built a death machine that all but destroyed one of the most important cities in the world. Do you have any idea how many people you could have killed, if everyone hadn’t been evacuated in time?”
“The weapon was never even supposed to be fired on the city, because we were almost certain Raiko would surrender.” Baatar sets his jaw. “But even if he hadn’t, we knew the people had been evacuated. Kuvira had supporters in Republic City sending her intel right up until the end. We knew all those buildings that might be caught in the crossfire would be empty. We’re not—”
He cuts himself off, his shoulders hunching, memory and pain settling on his face like a shroud. “It’s hard to stop saying ‘we,’” he says, his voice barely audible.
Silence descends on the room, until all Su can hear is her own heartbeat, too fast, too unsteady, roaring in her ears like river rapids.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” Baatar finally says, fingers tracing the wood grain on the table. “Part of me wishes I could tell you what you want to hear. But if that were true, it would make the last three years of my life meaningless. I love—loved—” He chokes on the words, face twisting in grief. “—Kuvira, but I would have gone with her regardless. The choice was mine, so the blame is mine, too.”
He waits a few beats before lifting his face, peering at her through his glasses.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, voice dull. “You probably want to leave me here to rot, now.”
“Of course not, sweetie.” Instinct overrides her distress, and she reaches for his hands again. The touch is tentative, but his fingers curl around hers, and it brings a measure of cold comfort. “I just need some time to think. But I’ll be back to see you again, all right? I promise.”
She gives his hands one last squeeze and rises, turning toward the door, until his voice stops her.
“She loves you, you know.”
Su swallows. For a moment she thinks about pretending she didn’t hear.
“Who?” she says instead. Somehow her feet carry her back to the table with slow, reluctant steps.
Her son looks up at her, brows low and furrowed over his eyes. “You know who. You were the closest thing she ever had to a mother. She told me once that she hoped after we were married, you would finally accept her as a full member of the family.” His lips press together in a grim line. “So much for that idea.”
Su hears a harsh scoffing sound, and it takes her a moment to recognize it as her own voice. “She certainly has a strange way of showing her ‘love.’”
“Yeah. I guess it’s like you said.” Baatar looks away, his eyes slipping closed, a broken picture of bitterness and longing. “She’s a complicated person.”
Su holds out another week and a half before the gnawing disquiet finally wins out over stubbornness.
The facility is out in the countryside, miles away from Republic City, little more than a handful of utilitarian buildings on a stretch of land so desolate even an escaped inmate would struggle to find a potential victim. Su follows the warden into the main foyer, glancing around in search of a visiting area.
The warden barks a dry laugh. “No fancy sitting rooms here,” he says. “No one ever comes to see the filth we got locked up in these parts.”
Su raises an eyebrow. “Except the Avatar?”
“Well, yeah.” The warden shrugs one massive shoulder. “Except for her, that one time. And you.” He casts a critical eye at her shoulders and wrists. “We’ll take you up to see the prisoner in her cell, but you’ll have to remove all traces of earth and metal from your person first. Standard security procedures—don’t worry, you’ll get everything back on the way out. Any rocks in your pockets?”
“What?” Su blinks. “No.”
He shrugs again, the other shoulder this time. “Can never tell with you earthbenders.”
He directs her to a plain locker, and Su unclasps her metal accessories one by one—the wrist plates, the band around her forehead, the collar of her gown—feeling a little pang with each absence. The sensation grows as she steps into the lift and begins the long journey up to Kuvira’s cell, a wooden box suspended far above even a master earthbender’s pull. The ground’s solid presence fades further away with each turn of the gears, until at last Su feels nothing at all.
The cramped warmth of the lift fails to suppress her shudder, or the rush of memories from her incarceration in Kuvira’s prison camp. What goes around comes around, she thinks, and the grim satisfaction steadies her steps.
“Here ya go,” the warden says, stepping out of the lift almost before it grinds to a halt, the gears’ screeching protest a testament to its lack of use. He points out a thin wooden drawbridge, the lone connection between the ex-Great Uniter and the outside world. “Just give us a holler when you’re ready to go back down.”
“Thank you.” Su nods briskly, taking her first step onto the bridge. “I shouldn’t be long.”
She crosses the short distance over the rickety bridge, her mind churning with months’ worth of pent-up why and how could you and what were you thinking, but the clamor fades to the back of her mind when she reaches the cell and peers through the wooden bars.
Kuvira looks…defeated.
She is thinner than Su remembers, the muscles on her bare arms standing out like knotted rope, trailing down to knobs of bone protruding through paper-delicate skin at her wrists. Limp hair hangs in wisps from her disheveled braid, and her face is skin pulled over sharp angles, prominent bones and hollow cheeks almost misshapen in the dim light. Su can’t tell whether the indigo discoloration beneath her eyes is from a lack of sleep or a well-placed fist.
Strangest of all is the distant look she wears, as though her mind is far, far away from her body, and for an uncomfortable jolting moment Su wonders if her former protégée has somehow found a way to enter the spirit world.
But then Kuvira stirs, her head tilting back as though it’s too heavy for her to control, and she blinks. The blankness in her eyes slowly dissipates, replaced by mixed recognition and disbelief.
“Su?” she says. It’s more of a croak than a word.
Su crosses her arms, hardens her eyes. “You look terrible,” she says. “And it’s only been a few months. Imagine how you’ll look once you’ve been in here for twenty or thirty years.”
If the barb wounds, Kuvira doesn’t show it. She climbs off her pallet and pulls herself to her feet, limbs unfurling in deliberate movements, half dancer’s grace and half prisoner’s fragility.
“I didn’t expect to ever see you again,” she says. Her voice is quiet, but a little of her old strength returns to her tone. She pulls her shoulders into the same stiff, straight line they formed so many times while graced with Zaofu’s guard uniform.
It’s an opening, but Su leaves it gaping, her fingers tightening on her forearms. The anger and accusations jangle in her mind, fighting for dominance as the silence deepens.
Then Kuvira takes a step forward. Her fingers twitch at her side, as though she wants to reach for the bars of her cell.
“Is…” Her voice catches on her sandpaper lips, and she takes a shallow breath. “Is Baatar still in prison?”
“For now, yes.” Su’s eyes narrow to stony slits. “But I’m hoping to have him transferred to house arrest in Zaofu until his trial takes place.”
Kuvira is quiet a moment, her gaze slipping to the side. “If you—and he—want me to,” she says, “I’ll testify that he wasn’t responsible for any of it. I coerced him, or…otherwise convinced him. That should help reduce his sentence.”
Hope stabs beneath Su’s breastbone, more painful than pleasant. “Junior says that isn’t true. Are you telling me otherwise?”
“I didn’t say it was true.” Kuvira swallows, a dry and scratching sound. The corner of her mouth flicks up, so brief it’s almost imperceptible. “But no one can prove it isn’t. He left his family to come with me; we were engaged. Any attorney could put the pieces together and make a convincing story out of it.”
Su purses her lips. “Somehow I doubt perjury would make your own case all that convincing.”
“It’s about his case, not mine.” The words are soft, almost resigned, but a resolute spark flares in her eyes. “He deserves a chance to live his life, to make the world a better place with all his thousands of projects. He has far too much potential to waste away in a cell for the rest of his life.” She closes her eyes, and her faraway look turns wistful. “And he deserves to be happy.”
Su sighs, some of the tension draining away despite her best efforts. “I would be willing to take you up on that, but I don’t think Junior will agree. I’ve tried talking to him more than once, but he insists on sharing the responsibility for everything you did.”
She shifts her stance, letting her arms unfold and rest by her sides. “Part of me wants to shake him for being so stubborn, but…I have to admit, there’s another part of me that’s proud of him.”
“You should be.” Kuvira smiles, and the shadows decrease beneath her eyes, black fading to purple. “I am, too.”
For a moment she could almost be guard-captain again, relaxed and at ease with her place in the world, her eyes alight and her braid draped over her shoulder. Su looks at her and remembers a thousand training sessions, meetings, dance rehearsals. She can see Kuvira patrolling the perimeter late in the afternoon with the twilight glinting on her armor, Kuvira unwrapping her wrists after a successful dance practice, Kuvira’s stoic face lit like sunshine as she metalbends—
Then she remembers Kuvira picking Zaofu clean like a vulture, Kuvira’s colossus built from the scavenged bones of Su’s beloved city, Kuvira’s spirit ray obliterating the warehouse and leaving only smoke and panic and devastation.
“You don’t get to be proud of him.” It’s meant as a snarl but bursts out of her more like a dragon’s roar, burning with rage, and she feels cold, hard satisfaction as Kuvira flinches backward. “You don’t get that privilege anymore. You lost it when you tried to kill him.”
“I…” Kuvira blinks, tries to wet her parched lips. “I didn’t—”
“You didn’t? You didn’t what?” Su feels something hard and rough grind into her palms, and realizes she’s gripping the cell’s bars with all her strength. “You didn’t mean to fire? Your hand just slipped, is that it?”
“I meant to fire.” Kuvira bows her head, her shoulders drooping. “I have no excuses.”
“No, I want to hear this.” Su leans in closer, face pressing between the bars. “What were you going to say? Because it sure sounded like the beginning of an excuse to me.”
“Only that I wasn’t trying to kill Baatar.” Kuvira’s head stays bowed, as though talking to the slats on the floor, but her words are clear. “Sometimes I hear the guards when they drop off my meals. ‘There she is, the crazy dictator who tried to kill her own fiancé.’” She takes a deep breath. “I was trying to kill the Avatar. Harming Baatar was the last thing I wanted to do. He was…”
Su pulls back from the bars, her lip curling. “A necessary sacrifice?”
Kuvira nods, stray hairs bobbing around her downturned face.
Silence falls, and Su lets it linger. A minute passes, then two.
“Were you always like this?” she finally says. “All those years in Zaofu, were you always just a tyrant in the making, someone willing to throw away her supposed loved ones without a second thought? I thought I knew you, but now I have to wonder if you just have uncanny acting abilities. Maybe Varrick should put you in those movers of his.”
Kuvira lifts her head, looking to Su with unreadable eyes.
“I was hoping to ask you that, actually,” she says.
Su frowns. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot.” Kuvira draws into herself, folding her arms across her stomach. “Not much else to do in here. I’ve been wondering if…if that’s why my parents left me. Maybe they saw something in me, something that hinted at what I would become. Maybe they left me at the police station hoping the authorities would put me away somewhere I couldn’t cause any trouble.”
She closes her eyes, a bitter laugh escaping her. “Instead, I ended up at the one place with access to the training, money, and equipment necessary to…do what I did.”
Her eyes snap open, a sudden flare of bright wet green in the murky cell. “Is that why you always told me no? Why you wouldn’t let me come with you to rescue the Avatar, why you wouldn’t listen when I asked you to help the Earth Kingdom? Why you never—” Her voice catches but she plows on, her eyes squeezing shut again like a trap door into her mind. “Why you never made me part of your family?”
“What on earth are you talking about?” A lump settles in Su’s chest, cold and heavy, and she forces her breathing under control. “I took you in when no one else wanted you. I nurtured your talents—”
“You nurtured my talents.” Kuvira’s voice twists with a sudden bitter spike, and spots of color appear on her cheeks. “You didn’t nurture me.”
The silence returns with a vengeance, broken only by the rasp of Kuvira’s breathing.
Su remembers again, but this time the scene is dimmer, blurred around the edges like a dream. She sees herself nearly two decades younger, raising three small children with two more on the way, every one of her days packed with activity from dawn to well past dusk—because out of all her children, her fledgling city was the neediest of all.
The little urchin girl with the solemn eyes and impassive mouth had been blissfully low-maintenance, fading to the back of Su’s mind more often than not, requiring little more than lessons and an encouraging word to make her rigid shoulders quiver with happiness.
“You were so stoic,” Su says. The memory dissolves, and the little girl ripples into the war criminal. “But you took to your metalbending lessons like a turtleduck to water. I never once thought you were unhappy.”
Kuvira stares at her, disbelief flooding her eyes.
“The last time I saw my parents,” she says, words rushing out like a stampede, “they took me to the police station and put me on a bench in the waiting room. They gave me some food so I wouldn’t ask any questions, and told me they would be back soon. When they walked out the door, my father took my mother’s hand, and she looked up at him and smiled. She smiled. It was nothing to them. They were just dropping off their garbage and going on with their lives.”
Her voice rings in the tiny cell, a raw, discordant note. “How could you think I wasn’t unhappy? How could you think all I needed was a metalbending teacher?”
Su opens her mouth, but finds no response. The accusation floods in, eroding the bedrock of her anger, and guilt slides down her spine like the first drops of cold rain heralding a storm.
She steels herself and reaches for the anger—justified anger, she tells herself, righteous anger—remembering the anguish of betrayal in her firstborn’s voice, Republic City’s half-empty skyline, the humiliation of losing the city she built with her own hands.
“Is that why you did all this?” she demands. “Why you disobeyed me and took Baatar Junior and half my guard on your tyranny spree? To get back at me for not being a good enough guardian?”
“No! Don’t you see?” Kuvira’s fists ball at her sides. “I did it because I knew people in the Earth Kingdom were suffering just like I did as a child. I couldn’t sit behind platinum domes in the safest city in the world, eating roast turtleduck every night, when I knew firsthand how desperate all those people must have felt. I just couldn’t.”
She wraps her arms around herself again, still-clenched fists digging in, leaving red knuckle imprints on her skin. “Su, why couldn’t you have just accepted Raiko and Tenzin’s offer? Then none of this would have happened.”
“Haven’t you learned anything from this?” Su steps forward, not bothering to keep the incredulity from her tone. “This is exactly why I refused, because this is what I predicted would happen: war, forced dissemination of my ideals, and even more chaos.”
“But it wouldn’t have happened if you’d been in charge,” Kuvira says. She leans heavily against the bars of her cell, resting her head on the rough-hewn wood and closing her eyes. “You wouldn’t have made the mistakes I did.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I’ve certainly made mistakes in my life.” Su takes a deep breath. “Apparently including some I never even knew about until today.”
Kuvira looks up slowly. She meets Su’s gaze, the barest hopeful gleam kindling in her eyes. “You mean…?”
“I hope you don’t think I’m the sort of person who would deliberately neglect a lonely eight-year-old child,” Su says, crossing her arms. “I didn’t realize you needed more than I was giving you, and that was a mistake.” She pauses a moment, waiting for the words to take hold, then continues. “But that doesn’t excuse your crimes. And it doesn’t mean I forgive you. You know, Kuvira, if you hadn’t done everything you did—if you’d just stayed in Zaofu—I would have been thrilled about your engagement to Junior. I would have been proud to have you as a daughter-in-law. And I would have happily welcomed you into the family. But none of that’s possible now, and this time you have only yourself to blame. You ruined your own chance at having a family.”
The words hit their mark, and she watches the devastation flash across Kuvira’s face, brief but absolute before she shoves it behind a mask of stone. Su waits to feel the cold glow of satisfaction, but it doesn’t come.
“I understand,” Kuvira says, the words almost inaudible. She stares straight ahead, her eyes glassy. “Would you please—I know it will never be enough, but would you tell Baatar I’m sorry and that I love him?”
“No.”
Kuvira closes her eyes, and her knees begin to buckle before she catches herself. “Suyin, please—”
“No, you listen to me, Kuvira.” Su presses her face to the bars, ignoring the voice in her head whispering you’ve done enough, leave it be. “You said it yourself, he deserves to live his life. And that means leaving you behind. If you truly loved him, you’d understand that.”
“I—” The stricken look passes over Kuvira’s face again, and Su watches as she shoves it down once more. “No, you’re right. Of course you’re right.”
She draws and releases a long, long breath. When she looks up again, her eyes are blank and clear. She looks, for all the world, like a metal clan guard-captain awaiting an order. “Do you need anything else from me?”
Su sighs.
“Listen,” she says, and to her mild surprise, her voice comes out gentler. Perhaps the anger’s all bled out of her, leaving her soft and empty like a drained riverbed. “You probably think I’m being overly harsh—”
“No.” Kuvira shakes her head, her eyes still expressionless, her breathing uneven. “No, I deserve everything you have to say.”
“Be that as it may...” Su rests her hands on the bars. “I didn’t want to admit this to myself, much less to you, but Korra has a way of pointing out some uncomfortable truths. Part of the reason I didn’t want to take Raiko and Tenzin up on their offer—part of the reason I think it might have ended just as badly if I had—is because I see a lot of myself in you. I did when you were younger, and I still do.”
Slowly, carefully, Kuvira meets her eyes, wary surprise darting across her face.
“It’s true,” Su says, voice quiet. “And when I was young and acting out, what I needed—and didn’t get—was a firm hand. Someone to rein me in with some tough love.”
Kuvira holds her gaze for a long moment before she nods. Her breathing gradually steadies, her jaw relaxing.
“Su,” she says, the words little more than a whisper. “You used to say people could change. For the better. Do you…do you still think that’s true?”
You could say no, another little voice whispers in Su’s mind. Hurt her. Watch the pain flash across her face one more time. She said it herself: she deserves it. No one deserves it more.
“I don’t know,” she says instead, and realizes she’s speaking the truth. “I don’t know, Kuvira. Maybe. I hope so.”
Kuvira’s eyes flicker to hers again. She says nothing, only nods, a ghost of a smile crossing her face.
Su doesn’t smile back—she knows in her bones, it’s too much, too soon—but she finds herself returning the nod as she turns away, walking back to the wooden bridge. She crosses it as briskly as she came, signaling the warden to raise the lift.
And she doesn’t quite know why, but as she boards the lift and begins her descent, she tilts her head back and looks up to the cell one more time.