Title: Alexandria Ambrosius
Summary: The lover of the Avatar does not get to grieve the way others do. / A present for smcdude on Tumblr, for the Avatar Secret Santa!
Author: Scar of Hope
Fandom: The Legend of Korra
Rating: Fiction K+ (For character death)
Pairings: Katara/Aang, Korra/Asami
Disclaimer: I am not anybody who might have any kind of legal claim to Avatar: The Last Airbender or Legend of Korra. I am but a humble worshipper at the altar of The Avatarverse.
When they married, it was not an Airbender wedding. Katara begged and cajoled but Aang would not do it. She relented.
Since he died, she had regretted it every day.
They never get married. Korra never asks, and it never occurs to Asami that it's something she ought to want. She has Korra, and Korra is enough.
It should be enough.
Aang never met his grandchildren. It is another thing that drives Katara to rambling, to aging pain and turns normal creaks and groan to agony and rage she cannot contain or expel.
He never hated her for giving him only one Airbender child. She hated herself enough for two.
Asami knows if she wants children, she will have to figure something out on her own. Korra cannot – will not, her mind supplies – be indisposed for so long. Female Avatars do not have children.
She tells Korra wwhen she finds a willing donor, a strong Earthbender with a smile and unfeigned eagerness to help the Avatar and the "Mother of Republic City." Korra smiles until there are tears in her eyes.
Aang is away when Tenzin is born and already Katara knows. The way she knew she was pregnant, the way she knows, Kya, strong as she is, is incapable of bloodbending she knows.
Somehow it fills her with dread, more than it comforts her, that in this, she has not failed.
Asami turns round with child the way starving child turns round with hunger. It is not long into pregnancy that she realizes why her mother had only one child, and by then it is already too late.
She does not tell Korra. In this, she will not fail.
Katara has been dreading Korra from the moment Aang's breath slipped between her fingers. Her spine fills with selfish terror when he dies, because she knows they will bring her the child, she who mastered her art at fourteen, Mother of Nations they call her, she will be given the highest honor, to train two Avatars...
She weeps. She hates the child before it has taken it's first breath.
At six moths Asami hemorrhages for the first time and Korra is so consumed with rage she nearly demolishes Air Temple island. She is so angry, and Asami is horrified that it is not at her, it's at the baby.
She stops talking to Asami's stomache, and Asami tries to pretend her heart isn't breaking.
The problem with Korra is that she is easy to love. Katara wants to hate her, wants to hate this child that took her Avatar, her husband her everything, but she can't. Korra is happy and fierce, all firey passion and fierce beauty. She is not Aang, but he's there in her smile, in the games she plays, in the way she throws her tiny arms round Katara's neck and love's her with everything she has.
Katara loves the child. But she never really forgives her.
Asami goes into labor at seven and a half months while Korra is miles and miles away, fighting Kuvira Loyalists in Ba Sing Se. Mako is with her, Bolin is in Zao Fu with Opal, and Tenzin's family is conducting Kai's tattoo ceremony at the western Air Temple. She gives birth alone.
She selfishly names her daughter Xmta, 'undying,' for her own strength, long before she knows Korra is dead.
Katara forgives Korra on the girls thirteenth brithday. The process of rebirth, of reincarnation, has finally dawned on her, and she asks a guard with all the innocent curiosity of an adolescent if anybody could tell her about Aang.
She apologizes with as much guilt as if she were a murderer and Katara knows. Only the truly blessed can say they were beloved by two Avatars.
Asami knows long before the White Lotus does. She knows before Xmta has Earthbended, let alone anything else. She can see Korra in every laugh, in every sparkle in her daughters eyes, in her laugh. She never needs to forgive Xmta. Xmta is her gift – Korra's last gift.
Only the truly blessed can say they were beloved by two Avatars.