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It's hard sometimes, to love a hero. Not only because they have such a great responsibility, because they see it as their duty to make sacrifices for the sake of the world.
But because if you're not a hero, not the way they are, how can you ever hope to be good enough?
Am I good enough?
Asami sighs and scratches through the lines of writing. Maybe no-one else is ever going to read them, but she doesn't want to take that chance. These insecurities are ridiculous. It shouldn't be getting to her, the recent angle some of the media outlets have taken, that a hero like the Avatar deserves someone better than her. (A bender, they mean but don't say, not overtly.) Someone with a special talent, a special destiny. (Not just some girl who's only in the Avatar's team at all because of her money, they say, quite outright.) Someone with a lineage they can be proud of. (Not someone with a father like hers, they hint at and skirt around.)
None of this should matter at all. She's been battling assumptions since she was five years old and made her first official public appearance with her parents, at some gathering of Republic City's elite. When she was seven, she left a grown man doubled up in pain for suggesting that her mother deserved what happened to her. When she was fifteen, she successfully demonstrated one of her own designs as the most successful in front of an entire board of middle-aged men who wanted nothing more than to see her fail. When she was eighteen, she stood up in front of the press and told them all that she wasn't her father, and that she wasn't going to fade away into obscurity because they wanted to pretend she was.
She is an expert at ignoring what they say about her, at smashing their assumptions into pieces and leaving them wide-eyed and speechless in her wake. She even did that with Korra when they first met.
So why does this matter? It shouldn't. It really shouldn't. Some of the newspapers and radio programs have come up with a dozen different ways to criticise her relationship with Korra, and most of them have been easy to brush off. Korra went round the City overturning a few newspaper stands and burning some of their pathetic words, and Asami spoke at press conferences to forcefully set the record straight, and they laughed about it afterwards.
But this latest angle has broken through some crack in her armour and found its way to that little part of her that doubts. Because why her? Out of all the people Korra could be with, why Asami?
It isn't that she isn't sure if Korra loves her. It's that she isn't sure if she deserves it.
(Maybe that's the kind of lesson you learn when the person you were once closest to in the whole world proved that their love for you was only conditional, and that your life mattered less to them than their own convictions. Maybe that's the kind of wound that never quite heals, no matter what they did afterwards.)
She doesn't mean to ask Korra about it. She just blurts it out, because her guard is down, because it always is around Korra. That careful shield she's put up to hide her emotions from the world falls to pieces with the girl she loves, even though (or perhaps because) Korra has never tried to force it down.
Korra's just come back from a successful Triad-busting mission with Chief Beifong and some of her officers, the kind of thing big enough to need the Avatar but routine enough that the rest of the team didn't get involved. And she's grinning as she describes how she took down one of their guys, an Earthbender easily twice her size. And Ikki and Meelo are revelling in her descriptions, looking delighted.
When Korra's finished explaining, she takes Asami's hand with a smile, and leads her away from the kids, who pout at their departure but let them go. They go up to the meditation gazebo, because it's kind of become their place, unofficially, and as soon as they're decidedly out of the way of everyone, Korra leans in towards Asami and kisses her. And Asami kisses Korra back, because of course she does, because she loves her more than anything and is somehow loved in return, and the words circle in her head again, outlined in newsprint and paper-cut sharp: why me?
And so when Korra breaks the kiss for a moment and leans their foreheads together and says “I love you,”, Asami asks, “why?”
It slips out before she can stop it, and once it's gone she has the urge to clap her hands over her mouth like she can swallow it back retrospectively, trap the word in and keep it from escaping.
“Why?” Korra asks, frowning at her. “What do you mean?”
“It's nothing,” she says, because it is, or at least it should be. “I just... I guess I sometimes wonder... why me? I mean, I'm so... boring. Ordinary. I'm a rich girl who inherited a company and has some talent with machinery. You're... you're a hero.”
Korra's eyes blaze with something in that moment that is almost like anger but not, something fierce and tender and fiercely tender all at once, and she shakes her head so hard that it sends her hair whipping around her face. “No. Don't ever say that.”
“I'm not... I'm not asking you to reassure me.” (Isn't she, though? She doesn't want to be, doesn't want to demand that, but why does anyone ever ask this kind of question?) “And I'm not... fishing for compliments, or anything. It's just kind of true, really, isn't it?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Korra...”
“Let me tell you who I am,” Korra says, and her eyes are still burning with that fierce intensity, like Asami is all that matters in the world to her and she wants to sear that truth into the fabric of the space between them. “I'm the Avatar. Sure. I'm the girl who can bend all the elements and make her eyes glow white and get super powerful. Sure. I'm the girl who's taken down the people who get in my way because I had to, and I wasn't alone doing it, and some people called me a hero for it. Sure. But I'm also the girl who felt like nobody got me until I met this... this brilliant, beautiful, incredible person who offered to drive me round a racetrack, and just... blew my world into a million pieces without me even knowing it, and put it back together better than it ever was before.
“I am the girl who was totally trapped in the Si Wong desert until that same brilliant person figured out a way to get us out of there, and did it like it was nothing, like she wasn't dazzling me more than the sun and...” Korra smiles, like she's remembering, like she's almost surprised herself at the way she's phrasing it all. “I'm the girl who went to the South Pole to heal because I was feeling worse than I could ever imagine feeling.
“I was drowning, and no-one else could really see it. And one of the only reasons I kept going was because someone never gave up on me. Because this girl halfway around the world, across the fucking ocean, kept writing letters, kept connecting us and reassuring me and never ever letting go. Like she was going to single-handedly build a bridge that could bring us back together. And she was you, Asami.”
Korra lifts her hand to cup Asami's cheek, and Asami covers Korra's hand with her own, holding it there, unable to hide her tears.
“So sure, to some people, some shitty people in the press who never really cared about either of us, some random strangers round the world who don't know the first thing about me... I might be the world's hero. But you're mine. You've been my hero ever since you first put on that glove of yours and showed me that I'd never been more wrong about anyone than I was about you when we first met. And I'm sorry if I haven't told you that enough, because you're always the one telling me, but it's true.”
“Korra, I...” She has no words, because what do you say to that? She doesn't understand how Korra can sometimes pull these answers out of nowhere and say things like poetry without even trying to, because they're only the truths she's thinking.
“Ha, I made you speechless,” Korra says, all lopsided grin and tears in her eyes. “But seriously, fuck anyone who says I can do better than you, because better than you doesn't exist, okay? And please try to stop underestimating my favourite person, because she's pretty much everything to me and I hate the way she talks about herself sometimes.”
“You think I can't say the same back?” Asami asks, her voice choked up because how is she ever supposed to get over a speech like that?
“I have no doubt you will.”
Asami bends her head to kiss her and it tastes of tears, and they stay there for a long moment, holding each other tightly.
“You're my hero too, you know,” Asami whispers against Korra's mouth, and she can feel Korra's smile, and she can remember a thousand moments where she was hurt and she survived, where love was painful but she didn't give up on it, and she doesn't know if that's what being a hero is or not, but she thinks she doesn't care if she is one, so long as she's the girl that Korra loves. And that's a truth that she can taste in their kiss and feel in Korra's hands in her hair and see in her eyes and hear in every single word Korra said, still lingering in her ears.
She's not sure she quite believes she deserves it yet, and she's not sure that Korra does, either, but she thinks they both know the truth of their love, and with that, maybe they can find their way.