Chapter Text
Everyone wants Korra to get better, she just wants to learn how to drive.
From the outside, it may seem counter-productive, but it’s a new skill, something useful. That, and Asami is the only one applying no pressure on the raw, soul-sucking, open, salted wound. Asami was a non-bender before, is a non-bender now, has an entire life made up of non-bending activities.
Everyone else Korra knows looks at her with pity.
What do you tell a freshly dead god?
Take your time, they all say, as though time is something that can fix this.
(An ember inside made of air but Korra does not want to think about that yet. She’ll get there, of course, is too strong-minded not to, but—not now.
Now, she wants to claw the wound closed with her tear-slippery hands and hope something inside shuts down so she can finally stop hurting.
She closes her eyes and thinks about her body as a machine. She is a factory of emotion. Pull the lever. Stop production. No more pain. The floor covered in steam, the lights dimming one by one. Surely losing your purpose should do that. Surely the machine knows when to stop.
Why won’t it?
Why won’t it?
Every morning her body wakes up, a malfunctioning hero. She doesn’t want to be strong anymore, she wants to be porcelain, for someone to drop her, stomp her, grind her to a pale dust so she can stop having a body that hurts, only because her spirit is in too much pain.
A hero.
The Avatar.
The incarnate, divine teacher, reborn again and again.
Korra shuts her eyes tighter.
Surely the machine knows when to stop.)
(Why won’t it?)
(And if she could, she would write a letter to whoever’s in charge.
Hey, I think I’m good now. I think I’ve learned the lesson. You can stop now. I think you overestimated my endurance, my resilience, all of those bright adjectives you liked so much, but whoever’s in charge doesn’t care.
Maybe because Korra is the one in charge, the Avatar, that cosmic switchboard, you know the one, and the air bending inside her flickers stubbornly. You don’t get to stop here.)
There is so much time for her, now, to learn air bending. I’ll get to that when I recover, she told Tenzin, though she hardly sees the use for it now.
What’s an Avatar who can only air bend? A loss of flavor, is it not? It tickles the back of her throat red with anger, so Korra kisses her parents, who do not know what to do, and joins Asami in Republic City.
(She’ll get to the healing part, but that comes after. After the rage and the self-inflicted violence and the screaming herself hoarse in her nightmares at night.
Korra does not want to meditate, isn’t ready to heal.
She wants to run out of pain, see if it has a bottom. Wants to exhaust the seemingly never-ending well of pure anguish that opens up under her feet every time something terribly small happens: Her tea cools up in her palms faster than before. Each step feels like the violation of a relationship she used to have with earth. Anytime her skin touches water, she wants to vomit.)
Asami, like everyone else, doesn’t know how to help. But unlike everyone else, she doesn’t try to.
She teaches Korra instead. Out of the citizen-studded streets and on her private race car circuit, they spend hours in Asami’s Satomobile.
You’re the worst student I’ve ever had, Asami tells her once in jest, and Korra is catapulted to her first day of air bending training and the realisation she might very well have been Tenzin‘s worst student yet. And also the last one.
She crashes the car.
After that, Asami stops using words like lesson or training or student.
She edits her speech around Korra’s outbursts until they can spend entire stretches of hours without Korra having to think about bending or her entire, meaningless, purposeless existence anymore.
They try to go out at first, but the death of the Avatar is a whalefall, and the world comes to feed. Everyone wants a piece of her. Reporters, politicians, fanatics, well-wishers—all circling the carcass of what she used to be.
Wishing you a speedy recovery.
You ruined everything.
You are so brave.
Do us a favor and finish what Amon started.
The loop never stops, from sympathy to cruelty and back again—just another cycle. Because how can an Avatar-less Avatar protect anyone, let alone restore the balance? And hasn’t she upset the balance enough already?
Korra stays in the Asami compound for weeks until it dies down.
Funny, no, how the loss of something can spark such wide ranging emotions across the board. Death threats become common, and Korra considers how easily one falls from grace once their usefulness has passed. How cheap the rent. One wrong move, one fall, and suddenly she’s just another carcass on the ocean floor, feeding the swarm.
If Asami feels pity, she doesn’t show it.
Korra is grateful. Grateful the first few days of her refusing to shower aren’t met with resistance but a shrug and a, I have an idea, let’s go eat outside today. New clothes, short hair, and just like that the Avatar is just another person who could be anyone, unidentified and unidentifiable, Asami’s guest.
Korra hides behind Asami like a coward, and Asami lets her.
In her anger, Korra rebelliously starts eating meat again, and the satisfaction is only equal to her self-loathing, that reminds her she’s still capable of feeling anything at all.
It takes her eight days to start showering again, and only because Asami may not hold her pity visible, but she does hold her shirt to her nose that morning and refuses to let Korra enter the vehicle until she stopped stinking.
The fun thing about driving is, there are levels.
Once she stops crashing, they start speeding.
Once she stops flinching, they start drifting, Asami in the passenger seat doing the only thing she knows how to do—be here.
They take the new models out for ill-advised races that feel like something kicking a small pebble in Korra’s chest—some feeling. Something barely noticeable that still resonates in the cavernous, empty chest that used to host four elements. Three gone, one to go. But it’s something, and Korra uses and abuses that pebble-kicking feeling. Finds ways to wake the pebble up.
She doesn’t remember when she started to want to kiss Asami. Somewhere between the crash site of her own faith and the sound of Asami’s laugh as Korra kept driving them in the grass. The where doesn’t really matter though, all she knows is the imperious desire is taking too much space in her too-wide, too-empty chest, and Korra refuses to give in.
Whatever Asami is offering her is lovely, but temporary. Korra isn’t going to race cars forever, she will go back to the Temple to master air bending—eventually.
Right now is a pocket of time Korra has allowed herself to be miserable in, she doesn’t want to contaminate it with joy. Still, there’s something in the air—ha.
She can sense, she thinks, a reciprocated interest that is just as leashed as her own, and it makes sense, of course. This entire stretch of months has been about Korra. Or more specifically, about Korra not thinking about who she is, avoiding herself.
She is surprised Asami might be attracted to her at all. She hasn’t exactly been rainbows and butterflies, nothing worth reaching for. But she can’t deny the few moments they had—where neither were pretending to play not a dead god—that felt real and true and lasting. Like life caught them both by surprise, throwing Korra a bone. Hey, there’s this, at least? A question Korra cannot answer in the positive, because now isn’t the time.
It happened first in the race tracks, day twenty-three.
The light was falling sideways, and Korra took a curve too fast, drifting. Asami turned, bright and green-eyed and beautiful, said something Korra didn’t catch, smiled—and it hit Korra like the kind of blow you can’t block because it comes from inside.
It has been steadily happening more and more, since.
A first, then a second, a third, a fourth, moments accumulating against a dam stacking with new emotions, and Korra can’t bend fire, but she can feel the warmth of Asami’s breath on her skin when they sit next shoulder to shoulder after a race. She can’t bend water—god—but she can feel it pool in the back of her throat when Asami laughs, a tidal-wave sort of feeling that moves through her all the same as the real thing used to. She can’t bend earth, but she feels the ground shift anyway every time their knees touch.
It’s catastrophic. Not the city-burning-down kind, it’s a cellular kind of world ending.The dam is groaning, the pebble in her chest kick-kicking. There’s a kind of divine comedy in surviving the end of your purpose, only to be undone by a woman’s smile.
Whoever is in charge is having a laugh, isn’t it, I’ll take your bending, your balance, your purpose, and I’ll leave you with this: forest green eyes like a match in an ocean of dark.
For the first time in months, she doesn’t feel dead.