Her strong brown body was reposed, naked and fetal against him, with an air of absolute tranquility that only came to her in an unconscious state, and as her knee twitched in relaxation and her chest rose and fell in time with his, he anxiously wondered exactly when his heart began to feel the evermore-acute ache of aggrieved love.
He hadn't meant to love her, and perhaps he truly didn't. Perhaps the way he could feel the emptiness in his bed when she was absent from it was merely indicative of his needing a new mattress, as the heaviness of his eyes when he looked upon her was of him needing glasses. Maybe the desire to make her laugh was no different from his general desire to be well-liked, and the concentration he put into making her come over and over again deepened purely from his male ego, from the want to continuously one-up himself. The way in which he cared for her may have been the way that everybody cared for their keeper of the peace, their balancer of the world: he wouldn't know; he'd never asked—never confessed that he cared himself.
No, that wasn't completely true: he'd told her, once or twice, in her most vulnerable moments, on the verge of tears and breaking under the pressure of being so young with a thousand lives worth of responsibilities on her shoulders, that it would be okay, and that he cared about her. And then he'd put her head under his chin and stroke her hair and pretend, for her sake, that he wasn't uncomfortable with consoling her; that he was okay with playing this devoted role. But he would never risk his life for her; never make sacrifices that couldn't be undone or replaced for her. It wasn't like he ever worried about her when she fought an enemy, though: he'd seen her do it one hundred times before in tougher conditions with weaker abilities. When someone once asked him, don't you get scared for her? he'd answered truthfully (and indifferently), no.
It couldn't be love if her life wasn't more important to him than his, or if he valued his own safety first. Protecting her wasn't an option, but he thought of no reason to make it one. She wasn't going to die; she wasn't going to get hurt beyond repair. Hers was a nerve of unbendable steel, a will of tungsten and titanium. So then, was loving her even a possibility? Didn't she have to be smaller, meeker, and softer for him, a man of one fluid element known neither for its raw strength nor durability, to be able to love her, a woman of every power in the world?
She stirred from a blithe dream, shifted her hips into him and sighed. Her hair, a tousled mess of uneven cuts and split ends that he privately adored, lightly tickled his bottom lip, chin, and neck. He breathed in the dull, faded scent of plain shampoo and reached over to delicately cover her hand with his.
Something tight and unwelcome in his chest wanted to gently wake her up with kisses and whispers, turn her onto her back and slowly, slowly take her; pleasure her; be inside of her for the sake of her relish rather than his own; thank her for all that she had done, all that she had shown him, all that she had helped him get back; for being forgiving once, twice, a million times; for swallowing her pride and compromising because she didn't want to just walk away from this in a fit of rage and irrationality; for making him furious and elated, for turning him on and pissing him off, all within five fucking minutes. She was a challenge, a frustration; she was beautiful; she was sometimes naïve and sometimes brilliant; she was a brat, a child, a woman; she was arrogant; she was grateful; she was competitive and powerful; she was too competitive and powerful; she was alive.
His head throbbed and his heart raced and his body reacted to the smoothness of her skin, but he did nothing. He would fight it, this consuming, painful, wonderful, horrifying feeling, because he knew that this would not last forever (and he wasn't sure he even wanted it to). There would maybe come a day when she'd sob out a confession of love and beg him to reciprocate, tears streaming down her dark cheeks and fists pounding at his chest. At his meanest he would sneer and say stop it, little girl; you're stupid and ugly when you cry. At his nicest he would remain silent and wear an odd expression of stoic sympathy and pity. It wouldn't matter how he reacted, because even with the words choking him, swelling in his throat and pulling at his tongue, he would never say them.
It was not his nature, not the person that the universe had wanted him to be. And sometime, far away in the future, he'd curse the spirits that had bestowed upon him this stubborn vanity and the inherit fears that came with it. But in the dark of the earliest morning with the offender his lover fast asleep and unawares of his heart's discord, he could allow himself to love her fully for the few minutes before he too was possessed by sleep.
In the morning he would get up and fix his hair, be an asshole to her for no reason (and at her demand apologize with an eye roll), and repeat to himself that he was Tahno and she was Korra, and he didn't fucking love her.