Here's a vignette.
First fanfiction. What do they call this, a drabble?
I'm testing the waters here. Cheers!
He hunches, fireside, and will be gone by morning.
This is Mako.
He lights a cigarette and muses on the wisps, the serpent smell, smoke extending legs and arms and tangling amongst itself. The charcoal and cured tobacco and what is that? Tar? Pooling about in his lungs, and he feels like a man.
Adult men make choices. Adult men choose to smoke, choose to fight, and choose their women. Surely, these worn, singed hands know what responsibility feels like. How fleeting time is. Boyhood. Manhood. Fatherhood. Birthed premature into the streets, he wonders if maturation is harming one's self and liking it.
A spike in his chest. He wheezes out the smoke, and lands in a fit of coughing.
Asami laughs. She holds out a stick of incense and waits for him to light it. The room begins to mist. She clasps her hands, stick betwixt them, and offers a benign prayer.
Only she's nude. Save for the furs that pool around her rump and thighs, peppered with falling ashes. That's what she is, a Venus in furs, knowing only consumption and gratitude, and the ebb and flow of gold. And yet her indecency is nothing but a poor amalgamation of devotion and nature. She only prays nude, she says. What good is appealing to the sacred without the likeness of her birth? Appeal to purity. Appeal to God.
To Mako, he can only see the pale swipes and stretches on the outside of her breasts; along the curve of her flank, the insides of her thighs. The stamp of canines on her neck. And a hot pink sear down her spine, from his worried and cindered fingers, from a night much like this. What could she possibly pray to? To the godhead that fills the body of another woman's? The millennia old spirit that twisted itself, misshapen, into a human, who could barely domesticate her own soul and keep it from spilling out of her? Her figure appeared to him in visions and thousand yard stares. Her mouth like burning meat and brine to the taste. He wanted to fuck God like a man, to hold Korra by the throat and drink her body like holy wine.
And that's where a languid Asami becomes a jest. A husk of a woman.
She's the Earth's spirit. Not God. It's different. It's different. Don't you know what Avatar means?
I don't see the difference.
The earth exists in solidarity, Mako. We are amongst a solar system. What if there is life? An Avatar of Jupiter. Or Venus.
I'm sure you're the Avatar of Venus.
Fuck you.
But there's such thing as nature, Asami. It's omnipotent. And I'll be damned if it's not in her. You know what else is omnipotent?
Don't push me. I don't idolize mortals.
Maybe that's it. These years of grinding his soul against the cobblestones of the underground, these years of telling his brother that one day, the both of them will die, these years of spitting out blood with his toothpaste—atoned. He sees her in cold sweat, rushing after him, faster, bloodthirsty, without sanctity or reason, with a carnal velocity that possesses him and exiles him into the kingdom of heaven. Heaven, heaven. Heaven sent, she is, she is everything a man is not, but not a woman.
Korra wears masculinity like a bad tattoo. Mako takes another drag.
Whistling in her bone marrow and sinew and muscle, she has been delivered to him in his plight. She will make him a man with her calloused workman's hands.
Asami's room becomes an ugly shrine. A statue of two hands, fingers long and enthused, glows gold on the mantle. The walls are pinned in rich damask. An armoire brandishes a war scene of samurai amongst a sparse wood. And there she is, chiding, her thumbs raking the tension out of his trapezius, her breath hot on his neck.
This is Asami. Sad, sad girl.
She'll still be there in the morning.