The globe is made of marble, and is half the size of seven year old Korra.
"It is a gift from the Firelord," one of her teachers says.
Korra only half hears it, walking forward with her arms outstretched to press her palms against the cold, hard surface. There are small cracks between her fingers where the different colors of swirling rock meet, carved to mark the four nations and the seas. The blue is the largest by far, and Korra finds this fitting, because water always cradles and holds her when she slips into the sea. If it can hold all of Korra, it can hold the world.
Her earthbending Master sees the globe as a teaching tool, labeling the different veins of rock and telling her to study them, paying close attention to why each land is what color. What pressures on what rocks make marble look this way, Avatar Korra?
She doesn't care about the details. One night she finds the screws that keep the brass meridian in place can come free with twists of her fingernails. She prys of the brass, tossing the platform to the floor, and cradles the cold globe in the dip of her stomach. Her fingers are too small to encompass the sides, but she can lift it, carry it with her, warm it with the fire in her belly that she isn't allowed to use yet.
She wants to see the whole world, and she will, and it will flood her vision like it has since she discovered herself to be the Avatar. It is her duty but more importantly, it is one she meets with her child's hands rough with callouses and a smile dimpling her cheeks.
—-
She thinks she is going to see the world like her previous life has, but instead, she falls asleep one night and wakes up to a city.
One city, not many, not even a string of tiny villages or islands or new nations - it is a cluster of inlets in a bay, strung together with looping steel and glass. It is loud with life, and Korra wonders if there are as many lives living here as she has lived in the past. Is that even possible? How old is she?
It takes one boy to remind her that she is seventeen, and human, and a girl when her palms sweat and heartbeat thrums like it has for thousands of lifetimes. The Avatar knows this, but Korra doesn't, she doesn't know that this is new each time but all she can feel is this foreign tug in her chest and in the tips of her fingers.
She comes to the realization that the world is bigger than she thinks when each dot of light across the bay becomes a person. Each lighted window is a human life, winking back at her as shades shut for sleep, but even late into the night the city burns in gold and neon.
It might be significant that the brightest light comes from the arena across the bay, where her eye catches the candlestick windows of the left minaret, amber light signaling his life. She has never paid attention to details before so she can't yet be sure if this one is more important than the others.
—-
Her world can't become Mako, even if his presence calls to her at times stronger than the elements. She can forget completely who she is and what she is meant to be, because when her hands are on him, they no longer hold power. They just hold him.
She remembers holding a cold rock called the world in her stomach, being told to look at the details, but now she understands why that request was so appalling to her. The Avatar cannot look at the world from afar and call the rock shapes under her fingers people. She isn't meant to hold the world in her hands, which are too small still despite being grown. She is meant to walk along the earth and be humbled by human beings, and call herself one.
Mako is the detail that lets her be Korra, that lets her be a good Avatar. His head is resting against her stomach, eyes shut, her fingers threaded through his hair.
What pressures were put on Mako to make him look this way, Korra?
He has discolored scars that run across his skin like veins of marble. There is a small pink one that cuts just into the arch of his left eyebrow, where hair won't grow. Two sweeping pairs of wrinkles grow deeper under his eyes with lack of sleep. His eyelashes are dark and short, jutting from under his eyelids like eaves over a front door, dimming lamplight yellow eyes which she flutters towards like a moth.
She has only ever trusted the knowledge her own fingers can seek, so she knows that despite the sharp angles of his face, his skin is soft. The curves of his cheekbones and eyebrows are a farce and tickle the pads of her fingertips when she touches them.
His lips are chapped and he smiles against them, revealing half-healed cuts that break raw and red, but he is accustomed to happiness being paired with pain. This hurts her and she resolves to fix them, but later. Right now, the world is calm and places second to Mako, until someone knocks on her bedroom door to remind her that a world exists outside.