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What was it about today that she hated?

The same day, every year. To any other person, it might seem delightfully agreeable, embarrassingly routine. But on this one, deplorable day, she finds herself getting inordinately angry.

Not that her friends can tell, mind. She keeps it to herself. In secret she'll snatch a scowl or a frown, but it never provides her with any release. It never gets any easier. And she never feels any better. There is a raw ache in her. It's always there, she acknowledges, it's been there since it happened, but she's grown used to it. Where once there was a booming, cacophonous symphony of agony, there is now a deep, low, buzzing, like a tiny spider-fly that insists on following her around, but never tires like she does.

For the rest of the year she is the perfect image of an old woman. Kind, caring, supportive, adorable she supposes. But all of these things are irrelevant. Everything she is, everything she prides herself on being goes out of the window when she cracks open her aging eyelids in the morning and remembers.

Something is missing.

She knows what it is, and where it's gone, but she can never reach it. Every morning she wakes up and is brutally reminded of its absence. It hasn't been in her possession for some years now, and though sometimes it seems so close that it is almost tangible, she knows she will never have it again.

So why can't she let go?

Truthfully, she never thought she would have to. Since she found it, it had been a constant. Something that was always there. It was something so vital, so necessary that she would never in one million years have imagined her life without it. She would never have dared to imagine the yawning emptiness in her heart, the palpable hole in her chest that it would leave when it left. This fact only made it worse. When she inevitably lost it, she shattered.

She never wanted to. This beautiful, immaculate thing that she had was the absolute highlight of her life. It was the greatest decision she had ever made and her number one reason for contentment. She would laugh with it and she would cry with it. It would tremble in her embrace and breathe on her neck and whisper in her ear and smile, oh the smile, and she had never felt so whole and so right, so loved than when it had been in her arms, near and safe and warm and hers. She had been sleeping before she found it and awake, so blissfully aware afterwards.

The others don't talk about it. They hurt too, she tells herself, they loved it and needed it too, but their obstinate silence on the subject implies otherwise. Only when the moment absolutely calls for mention do they relent, and this fact has filled her with regret and resentment. How can they survive without it? How could they possibly be happy if they loved it like she did?

Sometimes, however, she is grateful that they don't mention it. It helps that they avoid mentioning its name, that they don't tell the tales in which it features. That way, the dull hum she has schooled herself to tolerate doesn't grow, build in volume until it is a piercing howl that permeates everything she is, and hurts, hurts so much, like the first time, when she believed that this is the end. There is nothing after this.

But today is a happy occasion. A day to be celebrated, and under different circumstances, on any other day, she might have found the wherewithal to be genuinely cheerful.

But when she wakes, and forces herself to sit up and dress and wash, and as she gazes forlornly into the mirror and sees the tear stains and the exhaustion and the bereft longing, she knows that she will not be joining in the festivities. She will be lonely and depressed and if she lets them see her like this… well, deep in her miserable heart she knows that they deserve better from her.

So she'll put on her best mask, and she'll smile and talk and laugh as always, and she'll appear as joyous as she always has for her young friend.

"Katara!" she hears as the footsteps of the girl grow closer.

"It's so good to see you again!"

The young girl pants breathlessly as she flings her arms around aching shoulders. The embrace lasts for several moments and, strangely, it's the closest she has felt to anyone for months.

"Happy birthday, Korra."

Well, after a crisis of confidence and a severe case of procrastination, this is all you get! Thank you for reading!