Lightning Bolt Zolt knew that this was a business deal and a business deal only. Gainika was an annoying, ruthless, backstabbing, manipulative bitch…but he loved her anyway. Part of 'The Other Side of Me' 'verse.
Okay, so to catch up any new readers who haven't had a chance to read my fic, The Other Side of Me, allow me to give you a bit of backstory about Gainika: she is the Section Leader of the Agni Kais, a ruthless, badass, cunning, manipulative character, and (hopefully) is not a Mary Sue in any way, shape, or form.
Hope you enjoy!
Disclaimer: I do not own The Legend of Korra, or any of its trademarked characters. I only own Gainika, and a plethora of other original characters that appear in The Other Side of Me.
Love is a Four Letter Word by boasamishipper
Every time we lie awake
After every hit we take
Every feeling that I get
But I haven't missed you yet
Every roommate kept awake
By every sigh and scream we make
All the feelings that I get
But I still don't miss you yet
Only when I stop to think about it
I hate everything about you
Why do I love you?
Three Days Grace: "I Hate Everything About You"
The first time Lightning Bolt Zolt meets Gainika, she tries to set him on fire.
Both the Triple Threat Triads and the Agni Kais had been in a week-long turf war over the abandoned warehouse on 52nd Avenue—his men were exhausted, burned down to their insides, and barely had the strength to raise a cigarette to their lips, let alone pick up a heater. Zolt is pissed and has to squander the urge to rip the Agni Kais apart limb by limb (something that both Shin and Two-Toed Ping advise him against) and shove their limbs up their asses.
As was custom, Zolt walks over to the Agni Kais campout bearing a dirty white flag on a stick, yelling surrender. He demands one of the young, stocky Recruits to show him where their Section Leader is so Zolt can give that bastard a piece of his mind. Lips twitching, the young Recruit pointed to a large tent, and Zolt stormed towards it, his tirade already forming in his mind, ready to yell at this utter bastard for wasting his initiates and stealing their turf.
"Hey," he begins to yell and his words somehow stick in his throat as he lays eyes on possibly the most beautiful broad he's ever seen. The woman has dark brown hair cascading down her back, light amber eyes, and wore the signature Agni Kai uniform: blue jacket with the red trim, black top and khaki pants with combat boots. "Erm…" he makes a show of smoothing back his hair. "Where's the Section Leader?" he asks, because this woman is making him feel like he's taken one too many shots of cactus juice. Maybe she was one of the bastard's hookers or something, he surmises. No way is a pretty chick like this a high ranking Agni Kai…
The woman proves him wrong. "You're looking at her," she informs him primly, cocking an eyebrow. "Whaddya want?"
Zolt's jaw drops to his knees. Once he's capable of speech again, the first thing that comes to mind is, "The Section Leader's a girl?" and damnit, he sounds like he doesn't know his elbow from his ass.
The woman smirks. "Underwhelmed?" she stalks closer to him. "Or are ya just surprised your boys got their asses handed to them on a silver platter by a team led by a girl?"
If the woman was a boy, his hands would be wrapped around her throat until the life was choked out of that smirking, cocky bitch. But unfortunately she was a woman, so Zolt couldn't strangle her. Not without feeling the slightest bit guilty. "Not especially," he says instead. "But my boys were goin' easy on your preppy punks…in a real fight, they're way better combatants."
The woman strolls closer to him and puts her arms around him. Zolt fights the urge to twitch under the ferocity of her gaze. "Is that so, buddy boy?" asks the woman, seemingly casual. She kisses him on the cheek, almost making Zolt's stomach drop to his knees, and flicked her wrist.
Within a second, Zolt's pants set on fire.
Zolt runs as fast as he can out of the Section Leader's tent with his pants crumbling to ashes. The Recruits and the Triple Threats had both laughed themselves into oblivion when their respective leaders told them exactly what had happened.
"Crazy bitch," Zolt mutters as Dr. Zhen applies some salve to his legs, praying he never has to see that broad again.
(*) (*)
About three months later, the two meet up once more, this time by complete coincidence. Zolt is waiting on Two-Toed Ping to bring him information on a witness that fled to the Earth Kingdom, and decides to hang out in a speakeasy until his man shows up. He sits at a bar, downing a shot of tequila, and then he sees her.
The Section Leader of the Kasai Mage Makumei, the badass chick whose team defeated his men without a second glance, is sitting at a small round table, drinking some beer. Men who pass by her table, their mouths drop to the floor. Zolt snickers at how the Section Leader casually disses and dismisses them, and the men walk away with their heads hung down.
Zolt finds himself over there before he can blink. The Section Leader looks up, mouth open, ready to tell him to buzz off, and then the strangest thing happens that at first he thinks is part of his imagination.
She smiles.
"Long time no see," she says, gesturing for him to sit down like they're meeting up at the supermarket. She laughs. "The last time I saw you—"
"You set my pants on fire," Zolt deadpanned. "I know." Self-consciously, he rubs his thigh where there's still a burn scar.
The Section Leader sniggers. "You know," she leans forward, "I never got your name."
"Zolt," he informs her, puffing up like a rooster-peacock. "Lightning—" he's cut off by her laughing. "What?" he asks, affronted.
She snorts. "No, seriously."
"It's true," he says after a beat, realizing what she means. "Zolt. Like a zolt of lightning. Electric charge."
"That's a bolt of lightning, idiot," she tells him with a condescending tone in her voice.
"I know," he says, because really, she's starting to get on his nerves, and the last time this happened he said something stupid and wound up running out of her tent with his pants crumbling to ashes. "Full name's Lightning Bolt Zolt. Leader of the Triple Threats."
"Pleasure."
"You know, this's the part where you say your name," he states, cocking his head to the side. "Like, 'I'm…so-and-so,' or whatever your name is."
She snickers. "The name's Gainika."
"No, seriously," he mimics.
Gainika shakes her head, taking another sip of tequila. The bartender rushes over and gives her another shot, for some reason. Probably afraid of talking to her, Zolt thinks in amusement. "That's not my real name," she says, like he didn't guess. "I'm not telling you my real name."
"That's fine by me," he tells her. "I just needed something to call you in my head other than 'that crazy bitch,' 'the Section Leader', or 'that woman'."
For a second, he thinks he's made a fatal mistake when Gainika suddenly stands up and saunters over to him. Zolt keeps a firm grip on his heater, just in case he has to shoot the crazy bitch. She drags him out of the speakeasy by the ear and pushes him against the wall. Zolt has nearly fifteen years on this broad, who's barely in her twenties, but she's stronger than him without trying. "You're clean-shaven and smell pretty good. Want to have sex?" she asks, out of the blue.
Zolt is too taken-aback by the question to argue.
Six hours later, he wakes up in a strange bed in a strange room with Gainika holding a knife to his throat.
"Holy shit!" he scrambles out of the bed, too freaked out to realize he's wearing nothing but his birthday suit. "What the fuck—"
She shushes him, pointing the knife at him while putting on her underwear, a bra and his trench coat. "Tell anyone about this," she threatens, "And I will cut off your head and shove it up your ass."
Cowed, he nods.
Gainika leaves.
It's the last time he sees her for nearly a year.
Shin gives him hell for most of that time.
(*) (*)
Lightning Bolt Zolt paces inside of the empty warehouse in Ba Sing Se, ranting at the cowed criminal who towered over him and probably had fifty pounds on him. In any case, the criminal, Hasir, is cowering. "What the fucking hell do you mean," Zolt says dangerously, "that Bolin is alive?"
"Doctor K-Kono told me…" stammers Hasir. "He…erm…I paid him and he told me that the punk was alive."
"You stabbed him in the back!" Zolt yells. "How the hell did he pull through?"
"The pretty broad of his took him to the hospital before he bled out. His brother, the detective, he just stood there like a complete idiot." Hasir actually has the balls to snicker. "Spirits, what an idiot…"
Zolt desperately wants to throttle this incompetent, brainless son of a bitch. "That is not the point, you zozzled moron!" he shouts at Hasir. "We fucking hired you to put him out—it was supposed to teach Avatar Korra a lesson and make her give us our bending back!"
"How would that've worked?" Hasir asks, hands on his hips. "Would she have felt so miserable that she'd wake up one day and say, 'Hmm…maybe I should give the bastards that killed my friend their bending back?'"
"No!" Zolt tells him angrily. "She'd wake up in the morning and say, 'Wah, wah, those bastards killed my friend, and I don't want them to kill my boyfriend so I'll give them their bending back.'"
Hasir rolls his eyes, evidently gaining back his confidence. "Maybe it's a good thing that he's alive."
"Yeah, well, it doesn't make a difference if we know and no one else does," Zolt seethes. "We'll be on the radio for killing a dead man and we'll be in a psych ward by morning. I want my bending back, Hasir. You want to earthbend again, don't'cha? Shin wants to bend. Every fucking one of us wants to bend, dumbass!" he takes a breath. "Did Kono say where Sato was taking him?"
"Ba Sing Se." Great. Sin City. Agni Kai territory. This'll be fun, Zolt thinks, and for good measure kicks Hasir in the groin on the way out of the warehouse.
(*) (*)
"No."
"Gainika—"
"Nope. No. No way in hell, Zolt. I'm not prostituting myself just so we can catch some two-bit earthbending street rat!" Gainika yells at Zolt, who nearly takes a step back in surprise.
"C'mon, Gainika," he begs, pleading with her, something he's never done with anyone before because he is goddamn forty-seven years old and the leader of the Triple Threat Triads, and here he is begging to a twenty-five-year-old. I hate irony, he thinks. "Just think of it as some undercover mission! You should be flattered!"
Apparently this is the wrong thing to say, because Gainika gets right in his face. Zolt never thought he's sat this, but he's glad she got her bending taken away by Amon too, otherwise his pants would definitely be burning to kingdom come again. He hopes that the Recruits under her never find out that her bending was taken away.
"Flattered?" Gainika asks him, her voice getting louder and louder. "You think I should be flattered?! What the hell is wrong with you? Would you be flattered if I told you that you should go on an 'undercover' mission just because the criminal would find you mildly attractive? Who do you think I am, some hotsy-totsy peeler that advertises herself on the back of a newspaper? No way in hell am I doing this!" she takes a deep breath. "Zolt. This is ridiculous. I want my bending back as much as your initiates do, but I'm not doing this. Goodbye."
Gainika turns away, and Zolt curses under his breath before the solution hits him like a ton of bricks. He coughs and lights up a cigarette. "Look," he says. "If we—if my guys and…your guys…were to, erm, sign a peace treaty together, then could we work together?"
Gainika stops by the door of Zolt's office. Not turning around, she asks calmly, "What would this treaty entail?"
"None of your guys will get hurt by my guys, and vice versa, until Avatar Korra gives us—all of us," he corrects himself, "our bending back."
He can practically see her salivating over the offer, and hears her breathing quicken. Gainika turns around, runs towards him, grabs him by the collar and throws him against the desk for at least three (or four, Zolt stops keeping track after the second time) rounds of sex.
Two days later, a contract is drawn up between the Triads and the Agni Kais. Gainika cuts her palm open with a massive knife that she keeps in her bra, of all places, and does the same to his palm before gripping his cut hand with hers as hard as possible. As their blood mingles and creates a mess on the floor, Gainika signs the contract with a smirk, getting Recruit Wanryoku to be her witness. Zolt signs it a moment later, Shin being his witness.
That night, as they lay panting in bed together, Gainika turns to him. "When do I start?"
(*) (*)
Four years later, Gainika manages to lure the idiotic, bumbling Bolin into her apartment with the premise of moving furniture, removes everything that even hints of earth from her place, and gets her biggest goons to knock him out and bring him to the prison.
Her manipulation was a thing of beauty. Zolt laughs himself senseless as he hears Bolin yell at Gainika that he had wanted to ask her to marry him. That's just priceless, he thinks, wiping a tear of mirth from his eyes.
"Torture begins tomorrow," Gainika informs him. Zolt slings an arm around her, and then somehow finds himself on the floor, in a tight pin with his ears ringing and Gainika's knees on his wrists. "No one touches me," she whispers before getting off of him and walking away, smirking.
Zolt doesn't speak for the rest of the night.
(*) (*)
A month later, he hears a rumor from Shin about his initiates and Gainika's Recruits wondering about the relationship between Zolt and Gainika. Zolt is dumbfounded, because he honestly doesn't know. Friends, they were not at all. They weren't in love, nor are married, nor are in a healthy relationship of any sort. Their relationship was a business deal, Zolt knew. Gainika was a ruthless, manipulative bitch, after all, and they were not in a relationship at all.
He explains this to Shin, who laughs and shakes his head. "Denial," he says mockingly. "Always the first symptom."
Zolt chases the man around the compound with a loaded heater and a bullwhip for an hour before getting bored.
Four hours later, he is guilty of another murder.
Satoshi Daichi's.
(*) (*)
Another month passes, and Zolt finally understands Gainika.
His business partner is a master of manipulation and deceit, who knows exactly how to use everyone around her for her own personal benefit. She's ruthless, and deadly, and no one under her is willing to challenge her authority. (No one over her is either, Zolt knows. Himself included.)
Their relationship was a façade for the torture going on with Bolin, and promoted the peace treaty between the Agni Kais and the Triple Threats.
Gainika's nuts.
She's a master of torture and can kill him six ways to Sunday using a paperclip and a rubber band.
Lightning Bolt Zolt knows that this is a business deal and a business deal only, and that Gainika doesn't care for anything or anyone.
But he loves her anyway.