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Something is wrong with Korra, and it’s not just that her bending is gone.
(Not gone, Asami reminds herself. Taken.)
There are obvious signs. Everyone sees them. The sullen look on Korra’s face, the aftershocks still swimming in her eyes. The way she flinches from loud footsteps and voices. The way she has mostly stopped speaking, save for yes—no—I don’t know—I want to be alone.
Then there are the signs she’s trying to hide. Asami sees them all, though she wishes she didn’t. It’s a compulsion—like picking at a scab. One that isn’t hers to pick.
The first real red flag, the first indication that everything is somehow inexplicably worse than it feels, comes the night after Amon’s attack. The best healer in Republic City arrives on Air Temple Island and puts his hands on Korra’s temples, then the sides of her throat—Asami looks around the room when this happens, bewildered, because no one moves, and is she the only one who sees how Korra cringes away from his touch?—and it does no good. The healer gives the same answer he’s given Lin Beifong and Tahno and every other victim of Amon: whatever this is, it’s not a wound.
Some things never heal, of course. Asami knows this personally.
When the healer leaves, Mako tries to put his hand on Korra’s arm and she shrugs it off; Tenzin starts to tell her they’ll figure it out and she turns her face away from him. “I need a minute.” She stalks outside and no one goes to follow her.
Except for Asami. It’s that compulsion again—something ugly inside of her that needs to look closer. She thinks of car rides with her parents as a child, cruising down Kyoshi Bridge, until they’d roll past a carriage wreck and she could never drag her young eyes away from the carnage. The engineer in her likes to see things taken apart just as much as she likes to see them put together.
She lets five tense seconds of silence pass after Korra shuts the door. No one moves. Mako rubs the bridge of his nose; Tenzin fixes Lin with a heavy look, passing some kind of silent communication to her; Bolin looks at the chair that Korra vacated and lets his broad shoulders fall, a perfect parabola. Asami crosses the room and pauses once at the door, waiting to see if someone will stop her or follow or say anything at all, but no one does.
Of course they won’t, the ugly part of her thinks. You don’t belong here anymore.
It’s a harsh thought, sure, but it’s true. She hadn’t dwelled on it while the bombs were falling and the mecha tanks were marching, but now there is silence everywhere she turns, and she can’t avoid the reality of the situation anymore. She and Mako have called it quits. Amicably, but still. He avoids her like a contagion, his face red and flushed whenever they pass each other in the temple’s winding halls. He said he still cared, and she believes him; but deep down, he must not want to see her, at least not now.
Korra must want her to disappear off the face of earth, she’s sure of it. Maybe this is why Asami follows her outside—maybe she hopes that Korra will be the one to cut her loose. All she’s waiting for now is someone brave enough to say to her what she’s already thinking to herself. You don’t belong here anymore. And she can’t think of a braver person than Korra, the Avatar, the one who risked everything for everyone and lost it all.
She doesn’t know how she knows where to go, but she lets her legs take her aimlessly uphill, up a snaking path through the modest copse of trees on the western edge of the island. In the quiet, she hears it: a sharp, labored breath. Night has fallen fast over the island and the weak moonlight doesn’t quite break through the trees, so Asami goes to the source of the breath blindly, treading impossibly carefully, not daring to make a sound. Finally, the trees thin out. She comes upon a tiny clearing, and Korra.
Korra has her back to her, so Asami leans against a tree and watches. Moving unnervingly slowly (Asami doesn’t know Korra as well as she knows the boys, but she knows her well enough to find it strange if Korra does anything slowly), Korra sets her feet apart, taking up a shadow of a fighting stance. The turn of her ankle, the slight bend in her knee, the straight edge of her back: it’s like something from an ancient scroll, the texts that the benders used to learn from. Asami holds her breath and digs her fingers into the tree bark. Korra lifts her arms, one extended in front of her with the palm facing out, the other cocked back, elbow up, hand in a fist. She takes a breath, deep in her diaphragm. Then, release—one quick, powerful strike with her drawn fist.
The form is so perfect that even Asami can see it: a peal of flame, bright and beautiful in the way that only man-made fire ever is.
But of course, this is her imagination. Korra’s fist strikes air and nothing happens. The dark around them stays dark.
For a while—seconds, minutes?—neither of them moves. Korra stares at her outstretched hand like she doesn’t recognize it. Asami chews her lip and wonders if she should do the kind thing and call out to her, ask her to come inside, anything. But something that feels like fear holds her back.
The indefinite stillness finally ends. Unceremoniously, almost casually, Korra draws her fist back again and smashes it against the nearest tree trunk.
Asami thinks that her knees might give out. The sound of Korra’s knuckles hitting the tree is deafening. Asami does not need to see her hand to know that she’s certainly split the skin open, maybe even broken it.
Almost every part of her—because fundamentally, Asami is kind, even when she does not want to be—tells her to cross the distance between them and do whatever she physically can to stop Korra from doing that again, from doing something worse. But the ugly and fearful part of her, the small, powerful minority, is having its way tonight. Asami backs away from the clearing as quietly as she came, then walks all the way back to her room in the women’s dormitory, and she does not speak to anyone for the rest of the night.
Another red flag: showering.
Asami tells no one about the scene in the clearing (though in a fit of restlessness she does check that Korra is in her bed in the middle of the night, sliding her door open just an inch, confirming that there is an Avatar-sized lump under the blanket, and sharing a peculiarly knowing look with Naga, who stirs at the sound of the door but doesn’t bark). She goes back to bed and sleeps in bits and pieces, mostly lying awake with the moon until it gives way to the sun. When it’s bright enough outside not to feel strange leaving her room, she bundles a change of clothes under her arm and walks to the communal bathroom at the other end of the dormitory.
This early, she expects to have the showers to herself, but when she enters the room a plume of steam washes over. She doesn’t hear any of the showers running, but the smell of floral soap hangs in the air.
“Hello?” she calls, surprised to find that she’s mildly anxious, as if there could ever be someone dangerous on the island. She turns the corner of the shower stalls to the row of sinks, and there’s Korra, wrapped in a towel but otherwise undressed, her hair damp and loose around her face. Asami can see Korra’s injured hand resting on the sink and it makes her stomach turn. The wound looks raw, the skin bruised wherever it isn’t scraped off.
Why wouldn’t she heal that? she thinks, a taste like bile rising in her mouth before it hits her: Korra can’t heal that anymore. Not by herself, anyway.
“Do you want me to take a look at that?” The words spill out before Asami can think about it. Korra stares at her, then down at her hand, then back at Asami, a distrust glint in her eye.
“I was just about to wrap it, but, okay,” Korra mumbles, and for some reason it sounds like a lie.
A roll of gauze is balanced on the sink faucet. Asami reaches for it and unspools a few inches, moving slowly, the way one might around an spooked animal. Korra looks through her reflection in the mirror. The injury seems clean to Asami, so she takes Korra’s hand gently in her own and wraps the wound, end-to-end over her knuckles, as softly as she can while still pulling it tight. Korra is mostly still, but they’re close enough for Asami to see the muscles jump under the skin of her biceps, her collarbones, the one tendon in her neck that’s so taut it looks like it might snap. Like all of her might snap.
And then it’s done and Asami steps away. She doesn’t ask how the injury happens—she knows, of course. Whether Korra deduces this or not, Asami doesn’t know, but at the very least, she seems glad that Asami doesn’t pry.
“Thanks,” Korra says. Maybe it’s a trace of sleep still in her voice, but the hard edge that she’s been carrying around is gone now, and for the first time in days, she sounds like the teenager that she is.
“Don’t mention it.”
The problem with the shower is the frequency. Asami seems to be the only one who notices, and something feels wrong about that.
Later that day, in a bid for normalcy, she observes Ikki and Meelo playing airball (somehow, miraculously, they like her, and because Asami can’t talk to the people on the island that are her age anymore, she’ll at least enjoy the company of the next best thing). It’s almost fun; the kids bounce and skitter around her, laughing in spite of the horror and trauma they’re only a few days removed from—she finds this remarkable about children—and she catches herself laughing, too. Then things get out of hand, as they always do with the airbender kids; one moment, Asami is holding baby Rohan while Pema breaks up a heated argument between Ikki and Meelo, and then the next moment, the front of Asami’s jacket is covered in Rohan’s vomit. He looks at it and giggles.
“Really, Pema, it’s fine,” Asami assures her, returning the kicking baby to his mother’s arms. She excuses herself to the bathroom, peeling her jacket off on the way. She figures if she’s fast, she can scrub it off before it sets into the fabric, so she rushes to the sinks and gets the jacket under the faucet. In her concentration, it takes her a while to realize that one of the showers is running.
She finds this a little strange; it’s the middle of the day, after all. Not the most common time for a shower, though she supposes the ways of the acolytes don’t make sense to her yet. She busies herself with scrubbing and almost forgets the sound of the water running until it stops.
When the teakwood privacy divider slides open behind her, it’s not an air acolyte, but Korra, wrapped in a towel again. They make eye contact through the mirror for a too-long second. Asami drops her eyes, struck by the feeling that she’s seen something she wasn’t supposed to. The curious, ugly streak in her is well and gone now. More than anything she feels sad for the both of them.
“Everything okay?” Asami asks, pretending to be more interested in cleaning her jacket than she is.
“Yeah.” Korra holds her own shoulder, a strangely self-conscious move, like she’s hugging herself. She joins Asami at the sinks, inspecting her face in the mirror. She looks like she’s searching for something that she doesn’t find. Her face falls.
“You sure?” Asami doesn’t know where the bravery to ask this comes from, but she decides to ride it out while it's here.
Korra doesn’t answer. She looks down at her injured hand, unbound again, as she must have removed the bandage to bathe.
“I just don’t—” Korra tries, stops, starts again. “I don’t feel... clean. Not since—”
She seems unable to continue. How Asami knows that she doesn’t mean physically clean, she isn’t sure. But she understands. She looks at the skin on Korra’s arms and it looks raw to the touch, like she was trying to scrub through it, to reach underneath, and Asami understands. She takes the gauze down from the sink.
“Do you want me to wrap it again?”
“Okay.”
One of the real grownups—Tenzin, probably—decides that there’s nothing left to do but go to the South Pole and see if his mother can help restore Korra’s bending. Katara knows bloodbending, after all, and if she can’t undo Amon’s attack, who can? It feels like their last hope in every respect. Tenzin announces it over morning tea: at the end of the week, when the last of the Equalist biplanes and United Republic ships are dredged out of the bay, they’ll set sail for Wolf Cove.
Asami stares into her tea. So, this is it. Fun while it lasted—well, maybe not fun. She’s not sure why, but she feels with crushing finality that this is the end of the line for her and the so-called Team Avatar. She’s outlived her usefulness. She looks around the room and Bolin is looking at Mako, who’s looking at Korra, who’s looking at the floor. No one is looking at Asami. Her place in the chain is gone; she’s the discarded point of a now-defunct love triangle. What is she still doing there?
But she thinks about her life on the other side of the bay—what’s left of it, anyway—and she can’t bring herself to face it, either. In the city her father is in prison, waiting for trial, and her home is crawling with police officers looking for evidence against him, and the Future Industries factories are in shambles, and at the moment she doesn’t even know who the company belongs to. A lifetime ago, her father had explained that control of Future Industries would go to her if he were to die unexpectedly. At the time she had barely listened to him; he wasn't going anywhere. And he's not dead, anyway, though she wonders if life in prison is functionally the same thing. Just thinking about it makes her head pound. So she stares into her tea.
Some conversation passes over her that she doesn’t catch. A moment later, Bolin settles next to her, offering a weak smile.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Bolin fiddles with the edge of the floor mat he’s sitting on, reluctant to meet her eyes. “Are you going to come with us to the south?”
How did he sense her doubt? She feels a powerful urge to reach for him, even while a more powerful urge tells her not to trust the olive branch he’s extending.
“I don’t know if I should,” she hedges.
“You know we all want you to go, right?” he asks, firmly. “All of us. Mako and Korra, too.”
“I don’t—”
“Please come,” he says, softer now.
She still doesn’t believe him, but she wants to.
“I will.”
Korra is fading away right in front of us, Asami wants to say, though she doesn’t know who she should say it to. Am I the only one who sees it?
The day before their ship leaves for the south, Asami watches Korra from a safe distance, convinced that everyone else is looking through her, not at her. Why else would they all be so casual, putting one foot in front of the other? She feels like she must be going crazy. For reasons she neither understands nor cares to interrogate, she follows, feeling bizarrely like a street dog chasing a bone.
In the morning (after another shower), Korra goes to the highest cliff on the island, the one with a view of Yue Bay that eclipses the onlooker’s whole field of vision. She sits down and meditates for two hours. Asami watches her for two hours, which is a little like meditating, too.
Later, they all eat lunch together in the dining hall, and Korra eats nothing, though an unobservant person might think she did. She expertly pushes the noodles down beneath the broth, then sips the broth without enthusiasm, and the end result really does look like she put a dent in it. Asami would almost be impressed if it didn’t make her a little sick to her stomach. After lunch, Korra washes her hands for an abnormally long time, until, spurred on by a rare flash of boldness, Asami reaches past her and shuts the faucet off.
In the late afternoon, the kids convince Korra to watch them race each other on air scooters. (What they really want is for her to race with them, but this is out of the question; although Korra can still airbend, she hasn’t attempted it since Amon’s defeat. No one has asked why. Asami is scared to know the answer.)
Asami stays back by the temple doors, leaning on one of the great pillars in the entryway. It’s too far to make out what the kids are shouting to each other, and she can’t exactly tell Korra’s demeanor from here, but she guesses from the way that Korra draws her knees to her chest and hugs them, it’s nothing good. Still, it makes Asami feel better just to keep an eye out, though she doesn’t know what she’s keeping an eye out for.
“Hey, Asami.”
She tears her gaze away and finds Mako joining her under the temple’s entryway, hands buried in his pockets. His hair is a little flat today; his skin looks puffy under his eyes. Whether from sleep or crying, she doesn’t know him well enough to guess. Maybe she never really knew him that well to begin with.
“Mako.”
“How you holding up?”
The question hits her ears strangely. Her first thought is, how am I holding up from what? The reality of her father and the company simultaneously nosediving comes back to her. Right. That.
“I’m fine,” she decides, and it’s mostly the truth, if she doesn’t think about tomorrow. “You?”
He chews the inside of his cheek, stares out at the airbender kids or Korra or all of them. She wonders if anyone has asked him that in the last few days.
“Frustrated,” he finally says, spitting the word out with a good hard f in front. “I hate feeling like I can’t do anything to help her.”
I know exactly what you mean. But she doesn’t know how to say this, if she’s allowed to care as much as he does. “All any of us can do is be here.”
“Yeah. Be here.” He shuts his eyes and drags his hand over his face. “It’s hard, but it’ll be okay. Just gotta hold on till we see Katara.”
Asami stares at him and realizes that he believes that. He believes it with everything she has. She turns fully to him and gently takes hold of his wrist.
“Mako, do you know what you’re going to do if it doesn’t work? If her bending never comes back?”
He looks at her like she’s speaking in tongues. “What? No. I mean, it’s going to work. It has to.”
“But what if it doesn’t?”
He frowns at her. She can’t remember if he’s ever done that to her before. Not like that.
“Why are you asking?” The malice in his eyes shocks her. “Is that what you’re hoping for?”
She nearly slaps him. She imagines it, feels the bones in her hand twitch toward him, but she stops herself with a deep, steady breath.
“You know that’s not what I hope,” she says, keeping her voice perfectly even. His face falls, instantly washed in shame. “But she’s going to need you, more than ever if we can't bring her bending back. And you know her. You know how stubborn she can be. She’s going to push you away, but keep trying, okay?”
The backs of her eyes feel hot but she doesn’t let herself cry. Mako would never understand; he's already looking at her strangely.
“Okay,” he says. He pulls his arm from her grasp. “I’ll keep trying. But she’s tough, you know. I think she’s going to bounce back sooner than later.”
She’s seized by the desire to grab his shoulders and shake them—because how could he possibly believe that? Hasn’t he questioned the bandage on Korra’s hand, the dark circles under her eyes, the way she disappears for long stretches of the day? Does he really not see it?
“You don’t really have any reason to believe me,” she says, after another deep breath. “But I am telling you that it is worse than it looks, Mako. Please be careful with her.”
She walks away before he can respond. There’s nothing he could say to her that matters anymore, anyway.
The only ship they can find on such short notice is a small steamboat, which docks at the island after the sun has already halfway sunk itself to the west.
Asami watches the air acolytes load some overnight bags in the hull, her own bag clutched like a talisman to her chest. It’s her last chance now—to return to the city and never look back. She could get on the ferry and never speak to any of them ever again, give up on the Team Avatar fantasy, finally start rebuilding her life. She wonders how long it would take for them to notice. If Korra would notice at all.
She looks around at the thought, realizing she hasn’t seen Korra in a while. In the general chaos of packing and moving she’d slipped away again. Asami hates that this worries her but it does, deep in the pit of her stomach. She turns back towards the temple and walks, her bag falling to her side.
She finds not just Korra, but Mako, too, near the recently-rebuilt spinning gates. Asami stops in the shadow of a great oak and watches, which is all she does now, she thinks. She knows she shouldn’t—she knows that there can’t be a single good reason why she should want to eavesdrop on her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend, who quite forcefully inserted herself between them—but morbid curiosity roots her to the spot. She wonders if Mako will listen to her advice. They look like they’re arguing, though it’s hard to tell for sure. Korra has turned slightly away from Mako, who has his hands out in front of his chest, somewhere between pleading and exasperated. Korra says something; his hands drop forcefully to his sides. He turns heel and walks the other way.
That’s not what I told you to do, Asami thinks, shooting a desperate glance at Mako’s retreating form. Turn around. Try!
But he doesn’t turn around; Korra does. She meets Asami’s eyes. They’re too far from each other to know this for sure, but Asami knows anyway. They look at each other. The stone of the courtyard between them is golden in the evening sun. Asami looks, and she feels like something is about to happen, like one of them will move closer or walk away. Instead, voices ring out from somewhere behind her—Ikki and Jinora, calling their names in concert. KorraAsamiKorraAsamiKorra! Over and over, until her name sounds like Korra’s and Korra’s sounds like hers.
The ship is too small for everyone to have their own cabins, so they split themselves into smaller groups, crowded into the main hallway that crosses the lower deck. Tenzin awkwardly referees the distribution of rooms, staring red-faced from Korra to Mako before directing Mako and Bolin to take a room for themselves. Lin is granted the only single cabin—not by Tenzin, but by her own forceful declaration—which leaves one cabin for the airbender kids to bicker over; another for Tenzin, Pema, and Rohan; and, finally, one for Asami and Korra.
"Just like the dormitories on the island," Pema says cheerfully, giving Asami a surprisingly warm squeeze of her upper arm.
Not exactly, Asami thinks, but she returns Pema's smile nonetheless. She can think of no good reason to protest rooming with Korra; nothing besides trivial and/or inexplicable qualms, which she could never have the guts to say in front of any of them, especially not Korra. Is it weird for me to share a room with the girl my boyfriend left me for? She imagines saying this, if only to see the looks on Tenzin and Mako's faces. Can I have another room? I think my bunkmate hates me. Oh, and she's also in the middle of recovering from a traumatic experience, which I think I'm becoming overly invested in. As if she would ever be so brave.
Their cabin is barely five feet wide, a dreary metal square with bunk beds jutting out of the wall. "Top or bottom?" Korra asks, her voice sounding distracted and strained, as it usually does now. As she says this, Naga squeezes into the room behind her, snuffling at the new space. Between the three of them, the cabin is becoming unbearably claustrophobic. "Top, I guess," Asami decides, climbing to the upper bunk, more so to put some distance between them than out of any real preference.
Once the bags are stuffed under Korra's bunk, and Naga has curled up as comfortably as she can on the limited floor space, Asami reaches up and yanks the cord hanging from the bare bulb in the ceiling, casting them both into darkness. Asami lies down and finds that sleep is impossible; most of her mental energy is funneled into trying to be as still as she can, feeling self-conscious every time she moves and the hard mattress squeaks beneath her. She has an unshakeable feeling that Korra is still awake in the bunk beneath her, though she has no empirical evidence to point to this fact.
The ship rocks them both. Though Asami has been piloting planes, boats, and Satomobiles for as long as she was tall enough to reach the pedals, she finds herself becoming strangely seasick. She strains her ears, wondering if she can tell from the rhythm of Korra's breathing if she has fallen asleep yet. Worst-case scenarios sprout in her mind. She figures that if she absolutely must throw up, she can make it to the lavatory across the hall in fifteen, no, twenty seconds, and—damn it, Naga. Her calculations flit away from her as she cautiously peeks over the side of the bed and sees that Naga is stretched out over quite literally every inch of the floor that isn't covered by the bed.
Trapped, Asami screws her eyes shut and tries to remember old breathing exercises her sparring teachers taught her as a girl, praying that generous airflow will be enough to quell her rising nausea. In, hold, out. Again, again. Breathe in the bad, her trainer used to tell her (this was when she was very young, when she still woke up from nightmares of her mother's face, open-eyed and frozen in observance of death). Exhale, and let it go for good. In, hold, out.
She doesn't know how long she does this, nor how noisy her breathing exercise actually is, until Korra's voice floats up from the darkness below her.
"Are you okay?"
She freezes, mortified. She had nearly forgotten that Korra was even there, let alone awake. "Um—yes. Why?"
"Well, you kind of sound like you're going into labor."
A genuine but startled laugh spills out of Asami's mouth. Korra making a joke—well, she certainly hasn't heard that in a few days now. No one has. For a moment, the nausea recedes, replaced with the warmest feeling Asami can remember having in weeks.
“I'm okay," she assures, once her laughter subsides. "Just a little seasick. I didn't wake you, did I?"
"No, I was awake."
The lightness from the joke has drained away; her voice sounds tired and sad again, her new normal. Asami frowns at the ceiling.
“Can't sleep?"
"Sort of." An over-long pause. All she can hear is the sigh of Naga's sleeping breath. Deciding that that must have been the end of the conversation, Asami shuts her eyes again and tries to will herself to sleep before the nausea returns. Then, Korra speaks again, and with her eyes closed, Asami swears that Korra's voice sounds closer, all around her.
"Can I tell you something?"
At this, Asami holds her breath without meaning to. The sudden silence in the cabin is suffocating. She holds the air in her chest like something precious.
"Anything," Asami finally answers, exhaling roughly.
"I don't think it's going to work."
More pressing, freezing silence. Why are you telling me this? Asami wonders, trying desperately to come up with the right response, if there even is a right response. For some reason that she can't place, Asami is certain that Korra isn't seeking reassurance. She doesn't need to hear another empty promise, a weightless platitude, not when Tenzin and Mako and Bolin and everyone else they know have been repeating them ad nauseam since the trip to the South Pole was first announced. Something clicks in her mind—they're all just as scared as Korra, just as unsure of the future. So they're all holding onto hope. Maybe even harder than she is.
Someone has to be a realist, Asami decides. And she sees no reason why it shouldn't be her. What else does she have to lose, when she's lost everything already?
"It might not," Asami says.
She hears Korra's breath hitch below her, confirming Asami's suspicion that no one has dared to consider this possibility with Korra, to even slightly indulge her very valid fear.
"Then what do I do?" Korra's voice trembles like a child, and Asami thinks she can hear her own heart break.
"Then..." Asami pauses, feeling with utmost certainty that her words have never been more important than they are now, in the swaying bunk of a steamboat. "Then you do whatever you want."
Korra considers this for a while. When she finally speaks, a harsh edge has come into her voice, replacing the youthful fear. "What, because I won't be the Avatar anymore? So who cares, right?"
“That’s not what I said.” Asami keeps her voice level, trying to cool Korra’s mounting temper. “You’ll always be the Avatar. Bending or no bending. Whether people treat you like it or not. You are the Avatar.
“But,” Asami continues. Her voice feels deafening in the cramped cabin, pounding hard between her ears. “You’re a person, too. You have a life to live. You can still do what you love and be happy. I really want that for you, Korra. I really do.”
Silence again. Regret creeps into her as she replays her words in her mind, her face flushed with embarrassment. She feels as if she's revealed something she had been sworn to secrecy about, though she can't put her finger on what that something is. Nor can she pin down why an earnest expression to a sort-of friend has left her feeling raw and exposed. But it has. And with each passing minute that Korra doesn't respond, the more certain she is that she's made a mistake.
The bunk below her creaks softly. She wonders if Korra is finally asleep. At least, she hopes she is.
Until she speaks again. This time Korra's voice is not barbed, not hurt, not dripping with exhaustion, not anything—it's just hers. For a moment, Asami thinks she might be dreaming.
"Do you really mean that?"
"Of course." She tries to say it warmly, with conviction, but she's feeling short of breath all of a sudden and it comes out as a whisper. But the cabin is small; there's hardly any space between them. It's enough. She falls asleep.
In the morning, Asami opens her eyes to the metal ceiling a few feet above her and is slammed with nausea. It feels like being inside of a Future Industries mechasuit. Unwelcome images of her father pushing on the throttles of his own suit, of the rage in his eyes as she resisted him, come swarming back to her. She takes five very deep breaths and forces herself to sit up, then looks over the edge of the bed.
Immediately something seems off. Oh, she thinks. I can see the floor. Where is Naga, who had been moonlighting as an area rug the night before? More importantly—where's Korra?
She cranes her neck to look at the lower bunk and confirms that it's empty. Familiar anxiety creeps through her as she climbs unsteadily to the floor, and it does not leave her as she wrestles on a pair of boots and wraps her winter coat over her nightgown. It only increases as she stumbles out of the cabin, through the dark, creaky hallway, up the slippery steps, and finally out into the frigid sea-spray of the upper deck.
It's just before dawn, she thinks. Sleeping in the windowless cabin must have done a number on her internal clock; she was certain that it must have been the middle of the night. Instead, the first blazing slice of the sun is starting to climb into the Arctic air, frosting the low-hanging clouds with a golden haze. She still isn't sure where she's going, or why, but she puts one foot in front of the other until she's near the bow of the ship, and then she sees her.
Korra is leaning against the ship’s railing, arms bare, seemingly unbothered by the cold. She seems pensive, relaxed. Her demeanor is so starkly different from the past few days that Asami wonders if she’s dreaming again.
Asami approaches slowly, afraid to ruin the peaceful moment. Snippets of their conversation from the night before suddenly flit back to her mind; she feels a slight flush in her cheeks, embarrassed by her own candidness, and hopes that Korra will think that her cheeks are simply red from the chill.
“Hey,” Asami says, coming up beside Korra to lean her arms against the railing, too. “How’d you sleep?”
“Good,” Korra says. Her voice is light, too. She’s not smiling, but she’s not frowning, either. Asami feels a cautious swell of optimism in her chest. Maybe, miraculously, things will get better. “You?”
“Good,” Asami echoes. They don’t speak for a while, and it’s nice.
Korra eventually breaks the silence, her eyes fixed on some far-off point in the choppy sea. “Thanks. For what you said last night. It’s the first thing that’s made me feel better in—in a while.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I was thinking, you know, what I’ll do if it doesn’t work. What would make me happy. Besides being the Avatar, obviously.” She looks sheepishly down at her hands, clasped loosely in front of her. “Can I ask you for a favor?”
“Me?” Asami says, certain that she misheard her.
“Yes,” Korra says, still looking at her hands. “If we get back to Republic City, and I need to start being happy and living a non-Avatar life, or whatever. Can we… go racing on the Future Industries test track again?”
“Of course,” Asami says, feeling slight shock from how calmly Korra’s discussing the possibility of never bending again. A beat later, it occurs to Asami that she has no idea how to keep that promise—what’s even become of Future Industries in her absence?
It doesn’t matter, she thinks. A newfound resolve settles over her. For the first time in days, she feels the desire to get back to the company, to figure everything out. She has to. She gave her word.
“And…” Korra continues, glancing quickly at Asami. “Can I drive this time?”
Asami can’t help a soft laugh in response. “Maybe after a few lessons.”
“Deal.”
Eventually, they make it to the South Pole.
It doesn’t work. Then it does.
Asami experiences what she can only call emotional whiplash from the tumultuous day—first, the sinking, despairing feeling as Korra storms out of Katara’s room, clearly unhealed, and runs off into the tundra alone; total shock and awe after she returned some time later, her bending restored; and finally, pure joy as they watched her restore Lin’s bending. Asami doesn’t fully understand how Korra’s bending is back—something about Avatar Aang and energybending and “spirity-stuff”—but she knows that she’s happy, everyone is. And that’s something to savor.
There’s a quick celebratory dinner before they get back on the ship—Korra’s parents insist, and the moment is so jubilant that no one cares to argue—and then they’re off again, on their way to Republic City. The lighthearted feeling lasts. Korra chases the airbending kids around the upper deck, spraying them with whips of sea water that she bends from over the side of the ship. Mako and Bolin referee from the side of the deck, though Asami can’t figure out for the life of her what game they’re playing or how the point system works. Tenzin, Pema, and Lin look on, talking quietly amongst themselves.
Asami soon retires to the cabin alone, exhausted from the eventful day. As she gets ready for bed, the warmth in her chest begins to dissipate. She climbs up to her bunk. A nagging thought in the back of her mind finally pushes its way to the front.
She wonders if Korra will still want racing lessons.
The answer is probably no—too much Avatar business to attend to, now that her bending is back.
Asami goes to sleep with a lump in her throat.
The next few days are a whirlwind. The trip back to Republic City passes quickly, and there’s no time for prolonged goodbyes; as soon as their ship returns to Air Temple Island, they’re ambushed by the press. Most of the reporters flock straight to Korra as she gets off the ship, jostling each other out of the way for the first scoop on the Avatar’s return. Asami feels a surprising rush of protectiveness for Korra, who looks briefly overwhelmed by the clamor, and almost doesn’t notice when a lone reporter makes a beeline for her.
“Miss Sato,” the reporter says, holding out a tape recorder with one hand. “Future Industries is in free fall and your father is in police custody. What will you do now?”
She stares at him, dumbfounded for a moment. From the corner of her eye, she sees Tenzin whisk Korra away from the crowd of reporters, half-shoving them out of the way as he guides them both down the dock. The others follow close behind, heads down as cameras begin to flash. Asami considers following after them, but the reporter is still looking at her expectantly. She watches the rest of Team Avatar begin to shrink in her periphery.
What will you do now?
Asami considers going to say a real goodbye—she still can’t shake the feeling that maybe she was right, that they don’t want anything to do with her now that Korra’s bending is back—but she’s not sure what to say. So she catches a ride across the bay, back to Republic City, unceremonious and alone.
The city is still in a state of disrepair, but at least most of the debris has been cleared from the streets. The United Republic soldiers have cleared out and the citizens have returned to their normal lives. Things are almost the same, aside from some crater-like holes in the streets and sides of various buildings. After leaving the harbor, she finds her way back to her Satomobile, still parked haphazardly in front of the police headquarters with the key in the ignition. She savors the familiar feeling of being in the driver’s seat again for a moment, then wonders for the first time where she should go. She hasn’t been home in what feels like weeks now, and isn’t sure if she wants to be there at all—will it just remind her of her father? Of his betrayal? Eventually, she starts the engine and heads downtown for Future Industries Tower instead.
She had not imagined that anyone at Future Industries would be waiting for her return—in her head, she had pictured them blacklisting her for even being associated with Hiroshi’s crimes—but this turns out to be the opposite of the truth. The moment she steps through the door, it becomes immediately clear that she has, in fact, assumed control of the company, and that her employees are not pleased with her for leaving on an impromptu, unannounced Avatar healing vacation.
After that, Asami doesn’t sleep for three days. Every time she turns around, there’s a new meeting to attend, new plans to sign off on, new documents to review. She bounces in a constant loop from the Tower to the factories to the warehouses, all of which are in disarray, trying to right whatever she can, however she can. She spends a full day on the main factory floor, not leaving until the Satomobile production finally, painstakingly crawls to a start once more; then it’s straight back to the Tower, where the board of directors—which she is now a member of as the new CEO, a fact that she still finds bizarre and nightmarish—have convened another emergency meeting. Every meeting in the wake of a crisis is an emergency meeting, it turns out. They stay up till after midnight, working tirelessly on stop-gap funding measures while profits are nosediving.
But busy is good. Not once does she think about her father, locked up in a Republic City prison cell.
She does think of Korra, however, in another funding meeting. One of the directors floats the idea of leasing the test track out to third parties, or even bulldozing it and selling the land; the company is strapped for operating cash, after all, and certain unnecessary assets like the track should be the first to go if they can make a quick buck.
“No,” Asami says, sharp and final.
The other directors look at her in surprise. Throughout the meetings, Asami has usually been quiet, letting those with more business acumen drive the conversations; this time, however, she speaks up.
“Miss Sato,” the first director says, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “We’ve paused all racing car production indefinitely, so it’s unlikely we’ll have any profitable use for the test track anytime soon. Certainly we should consider selling, as we have so many other needs for—”
“I said no.”
A tense silence falls over the table. After a moment, another director comes forward with another proposal, and the conversation moves on. But Asami’s exhausted mind remains in place, remembering the last time she drove the test track, and who her passenger was.
She’s not sure if she still has a promise to keep. It's been almost a week, after all, and she's yet to hear from Team Avatar. She tries to tell herself that they're just busy—she hears all about Korra's life through the radio, now, and with the United Republic Council disbanding, and a presidential election in the works, Asami understands that political obligations are no doubt keeping her friends from making any house calls at the moment. But deep down, that old fear rears its head again—have they already forgotten her?
She knows, realistically, that Korra has far too much on her plate to still want those racing lessons, if she even wants anything to do with Asami at all anymore.
But Asami will be ready if she does.