A/N: So to get myself out of my writing slump, I've put this together. It's nothing brilliant, but I hope you enjoy it, either way. I thought I'd take advantage of the prompts from Korrasami month as much as possible. This is planned to be two chapters long. If people like it, I might write some prequels of some of their earlier adventures. The title is an homage to a poem by Lord Byron.

Asami Sato doesn't know it yet, but this is the day that will haunt her for the next three years.

It starts out routinely enough—or, well, as routinely as life can be when you're the youngest CEO in the history of the world running the largest corporation in the world, and you also happen to be sort of the sidekick to the most powerful superhero in the world.

It starts out with a hostage situation.

The police have blocked the area off, and no amount of hair flipping or ID-flashing is getting her through. (Maybe it's the grease smeared on her nose, she thinks, or the messy bun, that makes them dismiss her.)

Where is she? she wonders. She makes her way back to her car and grabs her phone, pulling up a GPS map of the area.

"You shouldn't be here."

The voice startles her and her phone slips from her hand, bouncing into her car.

The Avatar.

"You shouldn't be here."

"That's not the first time you've told me that," Asami says. Hastily, she wipes her hands on her pants and tries to compose herself. She turns and leans her hip with a false casualness on her Satomobile. In front of her, the Avatar is standing with her arms crossed. Today, she's in a tightfitting, blue suit with a matching blue mask over her eyes. What Asami can see of her face is compressed in frustration.

So maybe she'd been exaggerating earlier when she called herself a "sort of sidekick"—really, she'd begun running into the Avatar when Asami started dating Mako and going with him to stakeouts and busts. The Avatar started appearing, her powers impressive beyond any superpowers Asami had ever seen, and after things just…didn't work out with Mako, she'd built a police scanner for her own use. (It was just coincidence, of course, that Asami happened to appear at the same moment as the Avatar at crime scenes. It's not like Asami is trying to seek out the other woman's company. Of course. It has nothing to do with watching her rip rocks apart without touching them, or deflect bullets, or burst into fiery, impassioned blazes at every other moment. Asami Sato definitely does not follow superheroes around like a schoolgirl.)

(Definitely.)

The Avatar regards her from behind her half-mask. The strong line of her jaw clenches. Asami tries to discreetly wipe her hands again. (She's just nervous about the hostages. That's all.)

Surprisingly, the superhero drops her arms to her sides with a sigh. "I mean it this time, Asami." There's something new in her voice, something…trembling, and high-pitched, and Asami instinctively straightens in concern. "There's…this is different."

The fear lying just underneath the woman's voice triggers a memory, sudden and visceral.

Fleeing with the Avatar slumped in her arms, unconscious and vulnerable. She glanced behind her to see a fight between the police and the Red Lotus, bullets flying, She could see the fire and rocks flying as Mako and Bolin tried to fight back, but they simply weren't strong enough.

Being captured by another rival political party who wanted to use the Avatar for their own purposes. The mad exhilaration of escaping.

"The Red Lotus," Asami manages around her suddenly tightening throat. It's not a question.

The Avatar flinches and turns away slightly. "Yes."

"What—"

"They…" Asami sees the line of her jaw tighten again. She takes a half-step forward. Though she doesn't know the other woman's name, she's learned some things about her in the brief moments they've run into each other. She's learned signs of joy, and fear, and pain in the other woman's body. She knows that the Red Lotus, the anarchist group intent on killing the superhero for reasons unknown to Asami, haunts the Avatar, that her capture had been too close of a call.

Right now, she reads abject despair in the thick tension of the Avatar's shoulders as she takes a deep breath and speaks.

"They want me to turn myself in."

"No!" The shout startles even herself. Her chest feels tight. "No, Avatar, you—"

"I have to." The Avatar turns back to her, mouth set in determination. "He's kidnapped children, and he's going to kill them all if I don't turn myself in in the next hour."

Zaheer.

"Okay, well, what do we know about the building?" Asami asks. Her voice sounds unnaturally high to her own ears, and a strange ringing has begun to echo inside of her head. Fumbling, she grabs her phone from inside of her car, pulling up saved maps of various Future Industries construction sites. She scrolls through with shaking fingers.

"Asami…"

She ignores the other woman's voice—she knows what she wants to say, and doesn't want to hear it. "Here we go. Future Industries didn't construct this particular building, but we worked on a project next door. They actually share a basement area, so if we can get in the building of the one next door—"

A warm touch on her arm interrupts her thoughts, and she nearly drops her phone again. "Asami." The voice is firm now, and there is a heated quality underneath it that makes Asami's chest squeeze from something entirely different from panic. "I've already been through it with Mako and Bolin. And the Chief. The risks are too high." A pause. Then, softly, "I'm sorry."

There's something in the way she says it that sounds like "goodbye," and Asami blinks her eyes against a sudden burning. She turns toward the Avatar but finds herself too close, too close, and she can't think.

She steps back and takes a deep breath. Think. It's what Asami Sato does best, after all.

"You can't expect us to just let you give yourself up," she says. The slump of the Avatar's shoulders makes her pause. "I can't believe Mako and Bolin would have agreed to that plan."

She knows she's hit on something when the Avatar's mouth thins.

"They didn't, did they?" She hadn't seen them at the police line. "They're off trying to figure something else out, right? Another plan. And you're here to turn yourself in before more people could get hurt." Before the other woman can respond, her phone lights up. Detective Mako, her phone tells her. Triumphantly, she leans into her car and grabs her phone. "Mako, thank goodness. The Avatar is—"

But when she turns, phone held to her ear, the alleyway is empty.

"I don't know, Mako!" she grunts in frustration, trying to work her hairclip into the lock. "Couldn't you melt this damn thing off or something?"

Mako hovers nervously over her shoulder. "I don't think I can heat it up that high, Asami!" he shoots back. Bolin is off by the perimeters, trying to find some sort of earth to pry up in case Asami can't pick the lock. "Can't you go faster? Why didn't your maps or whatever have this door on them? Anything could be happening—"

"I know, Mako—" She doesn't have time to deal with Mako's unresolved feelings toward the superhero, and the thought makes something that the back of her mind tightens uncomfortably with another emotion she definitely doesn't have time to think about right now. A click, and the handle turns just so, and Asami yanks it open. "I want to find her too, okay? I—we can't let them hurt her. I know. We'll figure it out."

I hope.

They rush through into a basement that branches out in several directions. She points toward a set of stairs hidden dimly in a corner. "That way. That'll bring us up the back entrance. My guess is they'll have the hostages toward the back."

They'd decided to let the hostages loose first, knowing the Avatar would be unlikely to let them rescue her, or whatever would need to happen if the hostages were still in danger.

So they bolt up the stairs, Asami quickly fixing her electrical glove to her hand, glad she'd performed repairs on it the day before. Bolin yelps as she fires it up and a few bolts of electricity shoot out.

"Quiet, bro!" Mako scolds him.

Sighing internally, Asami reaches out and gently turns the knob. It turns easily in her hand, and she carefully opens the door a crack. When nothing happens, she opens it fully and steps into a dark, tiled room. Mako calls up a flame next to her, and suddenly a hundred tiny, frightened faces look back at her. The light from the flame glances off teardrops, lighting up the children's faces in a strange cacophony of fear and hope.

No one moves for a moment. "Uh," Asami starts. She hadn't exactly thought about how this would go and something still feels off. Like this has been too easy. "You're…safe…now?" she tries. Next to her, Mako sighs and reaches in his pocket.

"Republic City PD. It's okay now," he murmurs as he flashes his badge. All at once, the hundred thousand specks of tears and fear and happiness rush at them, and they are nearly bowled over into the basement. "Whoa, whoa!" Mako shouts. "C'mon, we need to escape, okay?"

"But the Avatar!" one young girl cries from somewhere in front of them. Asami squints into the darkness.

"What, have you seen her?" Bolin says, picking up toddlers in each arm.

The heads nod collectively.

"Where is she?" Asami presses, throat tight, and Mako shoots her a glance at the sharpness in her tone.

A young girl with two buns in her hair makes a frantic gesture. "The bad man took her! There was a big fight, and lots of explosions, and fire!"

Mako kneels down next to her. "Where did they go?"

She looks uncertain at first, but when Asami gives her an encouraging nod, she points to a door on the other side of the room.

Stairs to the roof, Asami guesses, seeing the vague outline of a sign next to it. She turns to Mako and Bolin. "You two focus on getting the kids out."

Immediately, Mako's eyebrows lower and his face hardens. "Asami, that wasn't the plan—"

"You said it yourself, Mako, we don't have time. If one of us goes to find her now, instead of all of us taking the children out, maybe there's something we can do to help."

"But, shouldn't one of us go?" Bolin says.

One of us. Someone with superpowers. Benders.

Asami sees Mako cringe, but she shakes her head at him, letting him know it's alright. "You're right, Bolin. You two might be more help in a fight, but that's exactly why you should stay with the kids for now. Just get back quickly in case we need back up." She lets her glove glow a little. "Hopefully we won't." Then she turns and races to the door, not waiting for a reply.

She should have known it was a trap.

A frantic message from Mako, just as she reaches the top of the stairs, tells her that they'd been trapped in the basement with the kids, and Bolin is trying to find a way to break through the earth. Someone or something had barricaded the neighboring building, then barricaded the door behind them, effectively locking them in total darkness underground.

As she adjusts the eyepiece linked to her phone, she sees a message blink into being in the upper right hand corner.

He's contacted the Chief, and hopefully she would spare a unit to help rescue them. Asami takes a deep, calming breath, panic once again seizing her, before she opens the door.

A gust of wind nearly sends her tumbling back down the stairs. Lifting her hand to shield her eyes against grains of dirt, she tries to make sense of the erratic noises happening around her, but all she hears is the wind screaming past her, the dirt pelting against her face, for long moments. Her heart leaps to her throat.

And then the wind and noise and screaming stops, finally. She keeps her gloved hand raised, just in case, and takes a step out onto the rooftop.

It's empty.

Then something whips past her, large and moving impossibly fast, and collides with the rooftop. Debris kicks up and Asami dodges to the side. When she rolls to her feet, electricity bristling over her hand, she looks up and her heart stops.

The Avatar is crouched on the roof. She's alive, Asami thinks, and the tightness in her chest that has been haunting her all day, since the moment she saw the Avatar's shoulders slump under an impossible burden, eases.

But she looks again, and her raised hand drops to the side. A vice grips her throat, choking her, making her vision blur for a moment in shock.

The Avatar is crouched, and around her bare wrists and ankles are broken chains. The muscles in her arms tense and loosen reflexively, almost like a long, slow twitch, and Asami reads the pain lying just beneath the surface of her skin. Asami can't help but begin moving toward her in some subconscious response to the agony she knows the other woman must be experiencing.

"Get up, Avatar!" a voice calls from above, and she freezes.

Zaheer.

And then the Avatar's head rises, and from her angle Asami just barely makes out her face, which has apparently become unmasked somewhere along the way.

Where the other woman's eyes would be were two glowing, piercing pools of light, and the sight of them strikes Asami. She's only seen the Avatar like this once before. With Amon, and the Equalists, and Asami's father, but she doesn't think about that anymore, doesn't want to think about it because it makes her hands shake and her head fog with rage and confusion, so she tries to focus on the Avatar, who maybe isn't beyond saving. Unlike her father.

Asami tries to get closer, but there is a burst of heat that races across her skin like a hot, hot touch and the Avatar has thundered into the air. Somewhere, the superhero has lost her shoes, and the chains trail behind her.

What have they done to you?

"Call Main Factory," she murmurs, the eyepiece automatically dialing the manager at the Republic City factory. A brush of air against the back of her neck, though, startles her, and she whirls with her fists raised. She finds herself staring into calm, gray-blue eyes.

"There is not much we can do now, Miss Sato," says Councilman Tenzin. For a moment, Asami sees an image of the girl with two buns in her hair. With a sinking feeling, she realizes that his children must be trapped underground with Bolin and Mako. He turns his gaze up and, despite the calm in his tone, she sees him clench his hands behind his back. "If we interfere, we may only end up hurting…the Avatar more." Something about his hesitation makes her wonder if he knows the superhero, knows her name, but Asami's train of thought is interrupted when the call she's placed finally connects.

"Miss Sato?" queries a voice in her ear. The factory. Slowly, she raises her hand and disconnects the call.

She turns her attention above them, seeing only brief, flashes of light and two bodies racing across the rooftops of taller buildings. "So what do we do?" she asks quietly.

Tenzin turns to her with a grim expression. "We wait."

By the time Mako and Bolin run onto the rooftop, having freed the children finally, panting and dirty but otherwise unharmed, the fight begins to turn for the worse. For a time, Zaheer and the Avatar drifted away, but they've slowly been making their way back to the original building. Asami has been too worried to cringe at the destruction to the city, though she knows she'll have to begin planning to rebuild. After.

After.

It feels like there will never be an after, that this fight will go on forever, the Avatar's body endlessly being tossed into windows, rooftops, concrete sidewalks that Asami herself has designed. Each impact shakes Asami, makes her feel like somehow, it's her hurting the other woman, the impossibly noble, strong, self-sacrificing woman who is so stubborn but so good.

And then, as they approach again, she sees Zaheer do something that will haunt her dreams.

He begins to suck the air out of the Avatar's lungs. A gray cloud surrounds her head, the air trailing out of her in a thin and reedy gasp. Even from the rooftop they can all hear her choking, see her body convulsing, the glow in her eyes sparking like faint lightning.

"We have to do something!" Mako cries. "Why are you just standing there?!"

Tenzin merely shakes his head. "If we try to attack from above, we might end up hitting the Avatar, Detective. And none of us possess the ability to fly, or a strong enough ability to reach him from here."

Asami feels numb.

She is watching the Avatar die, choking, gasping, chains dragging her arms and feet down, and she is powerless to stop it.

Asami wonders, distantly, what the city will do without her. Who will save children, and kittens stuck on windowsills, and stop gangs from harassing stores? Who will force the council members to think about more than political gains?

Who will fight alongside Asami in the face of injustice, and pain, and horrors, the way she had during Amon and the uprising of the Equalists?

Who will look at her, really look at her, and see more than a prissy rich girl? See more than the public face? Who will laugh the way the Avatar laughs, full and deep and much richer than money could ever make Asami?

After.

Asami feels, in that moment, that there will never be after. There will never be anything that could follow this moment, except numbness, and fear, and pain.

"Daddy!"

Somewhere behind them, a hundred tiny feet had plodded up the stairwell, and all of them turn around with a start, having been too worried about the Avatar to notice.

Councilman Tenzin's eyebrows rise in shock. "Meelo? What—Mako, didn't you—"

"We brought them to safety! I don't know how they got up here!"

"Daddy, we can help!"

Her mind working much more slowly than usual, Asami finally realizes—

The children all have superpowers. If enough of them work together…

And Zaheer turns toward them, finally seeing the small crowd of determined faces, and lets the Avatar go. Before he can do anything, however, the children have begun an elaborate movement, which Tenzin hastily joins, his face caught between surprise, pride, and fear. The Avatar's body crashes into a rooftop a block away, and immediately Asami turns to run down the stairs.

She doesn't see what happens, but she will read it a thousand times in the newspapers in the months to come:

Super Children Save the Avatar!

Is Our Hero Done For?

Why Did It Take Children to Save Republic City Superhero?

She runs down to the dark room they were in before, but instead of returning to the basement, she races to the front of the building, where she finds a glass door broken in. Absently, she wonders which of the children had the courage to break through. Outside, police officers are gathered, staring up at the fight in awe as a huge, whirling gust of air gathers just above.

Asami pays it no attention, though, as she turns a corner, dashing down an alley and out to the other side.

It will only be later, in the eerie not-quite-calm after the battle, that she will wonder why it was so important to her to find the Avatar, why she simply left Mako and Bolin behind, who worked with the Avatar nearly as much as she did over the last year.

It will only be later that she would wonder why she was so worried about never hearing the Avatar laugh again.

Asami bursts into a familiar building—she'd done repairs to its gas lines earlier that year—and runs past workers who are staring up at the sky with their mouths open. "A tornado!" she thinks she hears one cry, but she's too busy finding the elevator. She rides it to the top floor, then frantically stumbles around a corner to the roof access, which is a thin, rusting ladder forgotten in a small closet.

She climbs to the top and there, in the rubble of concrete and dust and blood—oh god blood—is the Avatar.

Someone else is already there, though, and Asami feels her limbs run cold, because the man is kneeling next to her, holding her—and crying.

He raises his face, and she is suddenly pierced with bright blue eyes. The strong jawline is familiar, and she knows, instantly, this man must be the Avatar's father. He protectively shields her face from Asami.

"You should go, Miss Sato," he says, and while the words make her rock back on her heels, while the words make her heart shrink and harden, she understands.

The Avatar needs to be protected.

And even though she's just met the man, she knows what he must also know: Asami Sato isn't, can't be, the one who protects her. Asami Sato, CEO, dogged constantly by the press, by people gaping at her as she drives by in the newest Satomobile—Asami Sato, who would be instantly recognized at any hospital. Asami Sato, known sidekick to the Avatar.

If Asami Sato knew the Avatar's identity, it would place them both in jeopardy.

Especially if the Avatar was vulnerable.

Her eyes burn, but she nods her head.

Asami Sato leaves the building.

It will be three years before she sees the Avatar again.