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Asami stares at the ruins of Republic City from Korra’s bedroom window. There’s no electricity but she can see by the fairy lights strung along Zhu Li and Varrick’s wedding pavilion outside. Party noises float through the window—wail of the jazz band, mostly, but Asami discerns separate voices; Bolin, trying to make a toast; Lin, ribbing Tenzin. Her mouth quirks in affection. She knows these people. In a quiet way, she is possessive of them, as if they belong to her.
The soft shuffle of the closet door. Korra emerges with a bundle of limp reds and blues, and Asami recognizes the clothes they wore fleeing sand dunes in the desert more than three years ago. Korra’s eyes apologize but neither of them has lived on the island in years, so of course this is all that is left.
Asami fingers the worn cloth and brings it to her nose. She smells mostly dust and moth balls, and a hint of soap, but she fancies for a second she detects sweat and metal and smoke beneath that from the long ago air temple battle against Zaheer.
Korra’s blue dress shimmers in the moonlight and Asami does not want to see her out of it. A warmth blooms in her chest at the sight of Korra in the elegant cloth, bare arms peeking through the fabric. A dab of makeup paints her face that Asami herself had applied a couple of hours before at the Avatar’s disgruntled permission.
She thinks Korra is the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen, but she doesn’t say this. She isn’t sure Korra would believe her. Beneath the dress she is hard lines and taut curves, and on her face there’s an expression of serenity. In her voice, too. She exudes a self-assurance that had made it easy for Asami to agree to be led from the wedding, Korra’s hand warm and calloused in hers as they snuck past the party and through the inner courtyard to the avatar’s old bedroom.
It is one o’ clock in the morning. They’d passed the last hour in comfortable silence and occasional murmurs, lounging on the pavilion and staring across the bay to what was left of Republic City. Korra’s elbow had brushed hers, fingers too, till suddenly their hands had been entangled without Asami able to pinpoint exactly how or when. Korra’s thumb had stroked the back of her hand, saying in gentle, ticklish touches the promise that she had not quite been able to give with her words: that she was sorry, that she was staying this time.
Asami did not even care that it was a foolish promise to make, that Korra couldn’t guarantee the future. It was enough to know that she meant it with absolute assertion in that very small, very fragile moment.
Korra lays their travel clothes on the bed and they change together, bare thighs brushing as they step from their formal wear. Korra’s hand knocks against Asami’s belly as she reaches over the bed for her tank top and their cheeks bump softly when Asami presses a pair of blue armbands into her hands.
There’s an easy hush between them. They look at each other, inspecting scars and bruises that have yellowed in the weeks since Kuvira’s attack. Korra’s stomach is defined, but her hands unconsciously trace an old scar that runs from her belly button to just below her breasts, which are bare and brown.
Asami doesn’t quite look at these. She can’t bring herself to.
On impulse, she slides the tank top from Korra’s hands and gestures for the other girl to raise her arms above her head. Korra obliges, and Asami weaves the shirt past her wiry forearms and biceps. The fabric covers her breasts, but not before Asami catches sight of brown nipples. The image is burned in her brain—sloped skin, pebbled with goosebumps, and hardened nubs.
She feels Korra’s eyes on her face. She bites her lip and busies herself with the three year old suit laid out on the bed, smoothing creases in the arm. The red looks faded. Very few of these still exist now. Funny, that the one that does is the one with all the memories stitched into it.
Korra steps into a fresh pair of underwear and her blue-dyed water tribe furs. Asami fingers the white lining and smiles, thinking of all the times she’s found Korra in a crowd in Republic City because of the way her clothes make her stand out.
“Aren’t you cold?” Korra asks, smirking. Asami is still stripped to her bra and panties. Black with red lace. Her satin dress is pooled on the floor at her feet. She’d left her heels at the door. She doesn’t miss the way Korra dutifully trains her eyes on the spot above Asami’s shoulder.
“Not really,” she admits. The window is open out of habit—Korra’s south pole disposition—and there’s always a breeze coming off the water that makes it ten degrees colder than anywhere else in the city, but Asami radiates heat; her arms prickle, her cheeks blush red, and she draws her hair around her face to hide it. She has always been bold in her romantic entanglements, even with Mako, but suddenly she’s shy in a way that’s unfamiliar and inexplicable.
She is Asami Sato, CEO of Future Industries, the most prominent corporate force in all the four nations, yet Korra has reduced her to a wordless blush—and she doesn’t even care, the way her heart pounds, full and sweet and wonderful, because Korra carries the future in her eyes. Maybe that is her real promise, that after loss like this there is someone still standing there to welcome the world into whatever comes after.
Maybe Asami can be that for her, too.
Korra helps Asami into her jacket and straightens her collar. “I’ll be right back,” she says. “Do you want anything from the kitchen?”
“I’m fine,” Asami says distractedly. Then something occurs to her. “Will there be anything to eat in the spirit world?”
Korra shrugs. “That wasn’t really something that was on my mind, before. I’m not sure that you really get hungry at all—I’ll pack some fire oranges, just in case. They sent a shipment over for the wedding and I think I saw an extra crate in the kitchen.”
She grins, all mischief and conspiracy, and Asami spies a glimpse of the girl she was before she was broken. She’s gentler now, softer around the eyes, and Asami wants to ask what happened with Kuvira in the spirit world but she also wants Korra to keep smiling at her like that forever because it justifies something for her, makes her believe they have reached a different side.
Korra bounds off and Asami hangs their dress clothes on hooks in the closet. She returns to the window, where her city glows eerily in its abandonment; the evacuation is still in effect.
The party has lulled now that Pema has herded her little ones to bed and most of the city officials, who were just there for show, have taken the ferry back to the eastern outskirts of the city, where a couple of apartment buildings have been transformed into their temporary headquarters. The jazz band is playing a soft, slow tune. Asami can’t see, but can imagine, Varrick and Zhu Li spinning in circles, Bolin and Opal too. Maybe Pema has returned for a dance with Tenzin.
Earlier in the evening, Asami had dragged a grinning Korra onto the dance floor for one of the flashier numbers. They’d held hands and gyrated, keeping a respectable distance between their waists, laughing more than they were dancing. One of them had fallen backwards into Lin, Asami can’t remember who, the night is a whirlwind of spiked punch and Korra’s sweaty hands. And then they’d sobered, and Korra had wandered off to discuss politics with Prince Wu while she reluctantly made small talk with a business associate from the fire nation who had been in negotiations with Future Industries before Kuvira’s attack.
But all of that spins away from her; she’s in Korra’s room in the dark, the fluorescent light of the spirit portal glowing sickly on the walls. The party murmurs somewhere in the distance but she is not a part of that, she is different, she is other; she has a city to reconstruct and a grave to dig in a park beside her mother’s, if it hasn’t been buried beneath the rubble—she is afraid to look. She’s held off, unwilling to overshadow Varrick’s wedding day with a funeral.
But it’s not any of that, not really. The island has gone quiet, the city too, the brick and mortar fixed in their destruction, and for a moment it’s easy to believe she exists alone in the world.
She doesn’t, of course, she’s being stupid and melodramatic and that’s unlike her, but her father is dead and that changes things and she’s trying to decide if his death is worse than his betrayal. She creaks; she feels old. She wants him back. The pain twists through her, makes her capable of anything. She understands his death, how little it means, how much she wants it to mean something.
She understands why he did it now—she wants to tell him that.
Soon enough Korra returns; she pads across the room and touches Asami’s shoulder, lets her know that she’s there although Asami heard her hurdle through the door. A pack of polar-bear dogs, she swears.
There are two bags, and Asami smells the citrusy tang of fire oranges. “A change of shoes,” Korra suggests, so Asami retrieves a dusty old pair of boots from the closet.
Korra doesn’t comment on this. Asami doesn’t explain about sleeping in this room while Korra was gone. Only a few nights, only when she visited the island and Tenzin insisted she sleep there instead of trekking back across the city to her apartment. Pema set her up in Korra’s old room without any fanfare, good at being perceptive but subtle.
Asami thinks of other things to pack, soap and a change of clothes and sleeping rolls, but Korra doesn’t suggest any of these things and Asami can admit how little she knows about the spirit world. She doesn’t like having blind spots, but with Korra it’s always been easy to fall into a natural rhythm of give and take; she lives in a world of bolts and screws, and Korra is wilder than that, but what could have easily created a disconnect between them instead feels like bridging the gaps between what she thought she knew and what is possible.
“I’ll say goodbye to Naga in the stables, and we can take a flying bison over,” Korra plans out loud.
“Tenzin—” Asami starts.
“I left him a note.” Korra grins smugly, like for once she’s actually thought this through and knows exactly what she’s doing.
They shoulder the packs and Korra slides open the door. Asami wants to follow her, but she’s fidgety. She’s been thinking about something Korra said outside on the pavilion.
“Korra,” she says, catching her sleeve.
Korra turns, looks up; her mouth forms a little ‘o’, like she’s waiting, maybe, for Asami to say that she’s changed her mind.
Asami takes a breath. “I didn’t want to be angry that day in the restaurant. I just was. I knew what you were going through. I should have understood.”
Korra’s eyes crinkle. She shakes her head. She leans up and presses her lips to the corner of Asami’s mouth. She smells like oranges. Asami turns her head to the side, just slightly, to kiss her fully. Her lips are soft and chapped and a little oily from the lipstick Asami had coerced her into wearing.
Korra pulls away, her eyes bright. “I wanted to do that now,” she says, as if it’s something they’ve always known.
Asami will ask her about Kuvira someday. Maybe the same day she takes Korra to visit her mother’s grave, and they let all their sorrow come washing out.
Tonight she slides the bedroom door shut behind them, and for a second the glow of the portal disappears. Korra takes her hand. Asami thinks that maybe this thing inside her is happiness. It’s been a long time.