A/N: Hey, guys. This is an idea that popped into my head after yesterday's episode, and I couldn't not write it. I figured, ever since the end of Book 3, we have a lot of Asami comforting Korra. We need some Korra comforting Asami.
If you're reading Fate Is Cruel, there will not be an update today. This oneshot is not the reason for that. I actually haven't even started Chapter 18 yet because finals are kind of wiping me out. I'll make sure it's done by Wednesday.
Warning: descriptive horror scenes, mentions of character death
She is in her office in the annex off the warehouse when she hears the explosion. It feels like the ground beneath her feet is moving. Behind her desk, the picture of her mother drops from the wall and breaks. A large chunk of ceiling crumbles away and nearly crushes her left foot. Books fly from the shelf and she can barely avoid them. She can barely stay on her feet. Out the window, she sees fire.
Asami opens her door to step into the workshop and finds that she is outside. Where there once lied a bustling factory, there is now only a large expanse of rubble. Screaming. She can hear screaming, but it is muffled. Do her ears still work? She does not bother to find out. Smoke burns her eyes.
She climbs out onto the pile of cement and looks back in the direction from which she came. The annex seems largely intact, save for cracks in the walls and the large hole where the roof of her office once was.
Unsure of what she is doing or where she is going, she starts across the hills and valleys of rubble. Pieces of wood burn, the orange glint of fire punctuating the sea of grey. She smells something metallic. Burning steel she thinks, but she knows it is not. She would recognize the smell of burning steel. Blood. It is probably blood.
The world seems to be in pieces. She can see the wreckage, hear the shrieks of pain. They are all around her, but she does not know where she is. There is so much cement, so much smoke. Shock. The thought passes fleetingly through her mind that she is probably in shock. She cannot remember quite what it means. Later, she will be surprised that she was even able to put the name to it at all.
The islands of burning wood are increasing in volume around her, like trees along the edge of a forest. She passes through a doorway, still imbedded in a standing cement wall, and enters what, only moments ago, was the storage facility. The wood is from shipping crates, she realizes. Her world is beginning to piece itself together again. The screaming is mostly behind her. The storage facility is silent. She will look back on this part of the memory with the realization that this is not a good thing. She will remember how eerie it was. Now, coming out of shock, it merely feels peaceful.
Someone is groaning ahead of her, and absently, she begins to make her way toward the noise. She steps over something green, a body that she will later discover once belonged to Wing. She continues toward the groans, but she cannot tell exactly where they are coming from. Her ear. Something is wrong with her left ear.
Her foot gets stuck in the rubble, and she cannot pull it free. When she looks down, she realizes that it is because there is a hand grasping her ankle. A hand tattooed with a blue arrow.
"Tenzin?" she asks the rubble. Her voice sounds like it is coming from someone else. She does not recognize it.
She kneels to shift a chunk of cement. A powerful gust of air gives her the leverage she needs to clear it away. The airbending master stares up at her from under the rubble, blood trickling from a gash down the side of his face.
"Who's that?" someone behind her barks. When she turns, Lin is climbing toward her, barefoot. "There's someone here," she announces, pointing to a spot to her right. Asami does not know who she is talking to. "And someone over there."
She pushes Asami out of the way more gently than Asami thinks she would have done normally and crouches beside Tenzin's head.
"My family?" Tenzin groans. "Your sister? Korra?"
"You're the first person we've found," Lin informs him grimly. "But don't worry." She glances back in Asami's direction. "We just got here."
She stands and backs away. Then, with a long, low grunt, she lifts the cement pieces off of the airbender all at once. The mountain of wreckage shifts gently beneath Asami's feet.
Tenzin rises carefully to his feet, Lin watching him like she is ready to rush to his aid at any moment, an expression of care on her face that Asami has never seen there before. She thinks she vaguely remembers Korra mentioning that they used to date.
Korra.
Where is Korra?
She suddenly feels panicked. She is stumbling over the wreckage as quickly as she can. She feels like her head is spinning. She can feel her heart hammering against her chest. She has to find Korra. She has to keep moving. She'll surely die if she stands still.
"Asami!" Tenzin calls after her. His voice sounds weak. She does not acknowledge him. He is injured, slower, and she cannot wait.
Someone catches her arm, and when she turns, Lin is there, studying her like a suspect. "You okay, kid?" Her face fades in and out.
"Korra," Asami breathes, trying desperately to pull away. Korra needs to be found. She needs her now. Why can't Lin understand how important this is? Korra is Asami's best friend. She is even more than that. She is something that Asami will not admit to.
"We'll find her," Lin assures her. She gestures at the rubble around them. "She's not going anywhere." Lin cocks her head to the side and narrows her eyes. "Maybe you should get somewhere safe, wait for Tenzin and I bring survivors."
"No." Asami shakes her head fiercely. "I'm going to help."
Lin sighs. "If you really think you're up to it." She gives Asami one last look, with intensity like she is trying to see directly into her brain. Then she releases her arm, and Asami stumbles away.
Lin and Tenzin gather around a small hill of cement where Lin first announced someone was buried. They are busy discussing how to bend the person out without injuring them. Tenzin has a frantic look in his eyes, one that, Asami imagines, is reflected in her own, but she has the distinct feeling that Lin is still watching her out of the corner of her eye. Lin has always made her slightly uneasy. She imagines that feeling is now amplified by adrenaline.
She feels like the breath is being pulled forcibly from her lungs when she catches it. A speck of brown in a sea of grey. A hand. A bent, bruised hand. She staggers toward it, drops to her knees beside it. Korra, she tells herself. Korra or Su. No, she shakes her head. Su's skin is not this dark. It has to be Korra.
She braces her arms under a piece of cement and pushes with her entire weight. She stumbles and nearly falling into the hole she has just created when it finally shifts, nearly stepping on someone's face. Feeling like her stomach is in her throat, she leans over and peers at the person.
Tenzin and Lin, look over when she screams. Beneath her, eyes closed and face completely coated in blood, lies the Avatar.
Asami jerks awake with a cry. She is sitting bolt upright on a rickety bed in a dark room, one hand braced against peeling wallpaper, breathing so heavily she thinks her chest might rip open.
"Asami?"
Korra is staring at her from the other bed across the room, her brow furrowed in concern.
Asami heaves a shaky sigh. "I'm sorry. Did I wake you?"
"I wasn't sleeping." Korra sits up and rubs the back of her neck, a yawn escaping her lips at the thought.
"Well, you aren't missing much," Asami mutters. Normally, Korra would have laughed, but now the room is silent. They can hear Jinora and Meelo crying next door. Ikki is dead.
They are in an abandoned inn in the sector of Republic City now overrun with spirit vines. They decided, after pulling everyone out of the wreckage, that they could not return to air temple island or Asami's manor. Anywhere Kuvira might expect them to be was a target. Mako and Bolin are down the hall, Su and Opal on their other side. Lin is awake in the lobby where Kai and Zhu Li and Bumi and Wei lie with the other survivors who are in a more serious condition. She is awkwardly bouncing Rohan on her knee for Tenzin and Pema, who have not been seen since they settled their oldest children into bed. Ikki rests with Wing and Varrick on a table in the dining room downstairs, her body lovingly covered with a tablecloth. In the room at the end of the hall, Bataar and Huan are taking turns watching Kuvira's fiancé, though Asami does not think this is strictly necessary. Bataar Jr. had not been in a condition to make an escape attempt the last time she saw him.
When they had arrived, Asami had immediately stripped down to her underwear, crawled under the moth-eaten blanket, and buried her face in the pillow, trying to ignore Jinora and Meelo's sobs seeping through one wall and Opal's through the other. Korra sat on the other bed for a while before lying back, fully clothed. She was still staring blankly at the ceiling when Asami passed out from fatigue.
Now, she climbs out of her own bed and shuffles across the room to sit beside Asami. Her face is dry but its blotchiness betrays that it has not been that way all night. The large gash on her forehead, the source of all the blood, is covered in a messy, wet scab that looks in danger of pulling itself apart again at any moment. Lin told her it needed medical attention. The conversation had been interrupted by a howl of pain from Su as she came across Wing's body. No one has received medical attention yet.
"Nightmares?" Korra asks gently. Asami nods, shivering and wrapping the blanket tightly around her body. Korra sighs and drapes an arm over her friend's shoulders. It is something Asami remembers doing for Korra in the aftermath of her fight with Zaheer.
A nervous laugh escapes Asami's lips, and it sounds warped and strange even to her own ears. "You must think I've been so sheltered," she sighs. "This is nothing after everything you've been through—"
Korra jostles her shoulder to stop her. "No," she replies firmly. "You're not allowed to feel guilty for being traumatized. It was bad back there. I saw it. And people are dead. People who were our friends."
"I've never seen anything like it." Asami feels tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, and she makes no move to prevent them from escaping down her cheeks. "I stepped over Wing's body," she whispers. "I didn't know it was him at the time, but…" She trails off as a sob wracks her body.
Korra's arm tightens around her shoulders. "I involved Ikki in our plan," she replies. "I don't know why. She was too young. I should have known that. She should have stayed on Air Temple Island with Pema."
"It wasn't your fault," Asami tells her. It is a familiar echo of the conversations they used to have three years ago.
"It wasn't any of our faults," Korra replies fiercely. "It was Kuvira."
Asami nods into her shoulder and collapses into another fit of sobs. Korra repositions her body so that she can envelope her friend in a hug that Asami gratefully sinks into. "I haven't seen anyone die since my mother," she admits between gasps, her voice muffled in Korra's shirt.
"You've never really told me about her," Korra answers, rubbing slow circles into the engineer's back. Asami is sure she is only asking to take her mind off the explosion, and she gladly takes her up on it.
"I don't remember her all that well, to be honest," she admits. "I was six when she died. But I remember she loved music. She was always playing music." She sniffles. "If I needed to find her in the house, all I had to do was follow the music. And I never had a nanny while she was alive, even though my father could afford one, because she was always there. She used to sing to me when I had nightmares."
"I'm afraid I can't sing very well," Korra comments, and Asami laughs wetly into her shoulder.
"My father says she was a genius," she continues. "Apparently, he could never beat her at Pai Sho, and he had to have been the best player in Republic City. He told me she kept saying she couldn't wait to teach me. She just wanted to wait a couple more years, until I could really understand the game."
She begins to pull away from Korra, but the Avatar catches her by the shoulders and gives her a searching look, to ascertain her mental state, Asami guesses. She remembers looking at Korra the same way. "Her name was Minna," she adds as Korra wipes away the stray tears leaking down her cheeks with her fingers. "She was beautiful."
"You look just like her," the other girl comments. If things had been normal, the implications of the statement would have caused them both to blush, but three of their friends are dead, even more of them still might die, and they are hiding in a musty room in an inn, surrounded by newly broken families. Asami remembers what that feeling is like. Like she was being eaten from the inside out.
"Don't come in here, Asami," her father yelled at her, pushing her away from the library doorway. "Go to your room and close the door."
They had just arrived back from a pro-bending match. Her father had been given two tickets in the top box, but her mother did not like pro-bending, so he had taken Asami instead. Her first ever pro-bending match.
Behind him, she could see the orange glow of flames. There was a smell like nothing she had ever smelled before or would smell again. She realized what it was when she was twelve, but she does not like to think about it.
The police arrived only minutes later, but they stayed the entire night. Her father spent most of the night crying. She kept trying to come out of her room, to find out what was happening. She wanted to kiss her mother goodnight. Someone kept finding her before she could reach her father and ushering her back to bed. Like she was going to sleep with two dozen strangers not even bothering to lower their voices when they passed her room.
Just before sunrise, the smell became stronger. It was different now. It smelled charred. She recognized the smell of char because her mother could never cook, but that did not stop her from trying.
She opened her door just at the police officers were carrying something past on a stretcher. Something black and red and person-sized. Something unrecognizable. Her stomach still churns when she thinks about it. She did not see her mother again.
Korra's hand is resting absently on her shoulder, and Asami swallows thickly. "I was so afraid you were dead." Her voice is harsh and ragged and her chest hurts from crying.
Korra squeezes her shoulder and drops her hand back to the blanket. "Well," she shrugs. "Here I am."
"Here you are," Asami repeats, dropping her eyes into her lap and feeling like she might blush after all. Even if her slightly confused feelings toward her friend should be the farthest thing from her mind at a time like this.
"I was worried about you too," Korra admits. "When I was laying under all that wreckage, before I passed out, I was trying to account for everyone, and I couldn't remember where you were. I remembered you left, but I couldn't remember where you said you were going."
Asami tugs at a stray thread in the blanket. "I was in my office."
"Well, I know that now." Korra rolls her eyes, and they collapse in a fit a giggles. It feels good to laugh, better than Asami could have ever imagined it feeling, but it also feels bad, because she can still hear Jinora crying softly next door.
"I'm so glad you're not dead," Asami says, pulling Korra into another hug and remembering the rush of paralyzing terror the exact moment she saw her friend's face covered in a dark red that reminded her of her mother's body. "I couldn't have lost someone else."
When she pulls away, Korra is smiling at her sympathetically. Not the kind of sympathy that twists her stomach and makes her want to scream that she does not need pity. The kind that makes her feel warm and safe and understood, because the person looking at her has seen horrors as well. The person looking at her does not think she is weak for crying, for screaming, for knowing how to feel pain.
"Do you want me to stay until you go back to sleep?" Korra asks.
Asami heaves a long sigh. "I don't know if I will."
"Try," the Avatar instructs her. "Here," she crosses her legs and guides Asami's head into her lap. "This is what my mom used to do for me when I had nightmares."
"But, won't I keep you up?" Asami asks as Korra's finger's begin to brush the hair away from her face.
"I don't think I was ever going to sleep tonight." Korra shrugs. "Besides, how many sleepless nights did you have with me after I fought Zaheer. I'm just repaying the favor."
"You don't need to," Asami yawns.
"I know. I want to. We don't let favors go unreturned in the Southern Water Tribe." Korra's finger's slip easily through her hair, and it feels irresistibly relaxing. "We're honorable like that."
Asami smirks. "I'm sure."
"Try to get some sleep," Korra reminds her. "You'll want to be well rested tomorrow when you realize your entire company is gone again."
The engineer groans. "Why did you have to remind me of that?"
"Because there are worse things," the Avatar explains, and Asami finds that she understands. There are worse things to be thinking about. Jinora and Meelo lost a sister. Opal lost a brother. Su lost a son. Zhu Li lost… whatever Zhu Li lost. All Asami lost were machines.
"We'll deal with it in the morning," Korra adds. "I'm sure you still have all the plans somewhere. You'll be fine."
"My office was pretty intact," Asami agrees. "Do me a favor and remind me of that when I have a panic attack over it tomorrow."
"Deal," Korra replies as Asami nestles her head into her furs. "Besides, you have to get your company back up and running. With Varrick gone, you're all the world has left."
"That's a little more pressure than I want," Asami comments.
"Welcome to the club," Korra grumbles, though there is humor in her voice. "Maybe you can talk to Su and Bataar once things have calmed down. I mean, look what they did with Zaofu. Maybe they'll go into business with you."
"Maybe," Asami repeats. Her eyelids are beginning to droop again, but she does not want to sleep. She does not want morning to come. In the morning, they will have to deal with the reality of their situation. They will have to bury the bodies. All she wants is to lie here with her best friend, her maybe more, in this moment, ignoring the rest of the world.
"Now go to sleep," the other girl reprimands. "This is the last time I'm going to tell you."
"Then stop making conversation," Asami argues. She doesn't even know what the point is, honestly. The sun is probably almost up. Depending on the competency of the soldiers Lin left the President with, Raiko may have already turned the United Republic over to Kuvira by now, and they will have to leave early if they want to retrieve the designs from her office without being spotted. She should have grabbed them before they left. She was too shaken to think straight. It is slightly embarrassing.
"We'll take care of it, Asami. I promise." Korra murmurs, as if she is reading her mind. She is staring absently out the window, her fingers still sliding through her friend's hair. "Kuvira's going down."
The ferocity in her voice is so thick that Asami thinks if her head was not in her lap, the Avatar might sneak out to take on Kuvira tonight, recklessness fueled by grief and fury. She fists her hand in the loose material of Korra's pants, as if that alone can keep her there, in the relative safety of the inn forever. Loosing Korra has always been a possibility. Asami knows that. As the CEO of a major corporation, she is supposed to be prepared for any possibility. This one she has been ignoring.
She can ignore it for one more night.
A/N: Thanks for reading, everyone! Drop me a review if you have a minute!
Edit: I have a lot of people following this story, so I just want to reiterate that it is, in fact, a oneshot. As of right now, I have no plans on continuing it. If you're just following it to keep it handy, that's cool. You do you. I just want to make sure that you guys aren't expecting an update.