Type: One-shot/Drabble/Song!fic
Rating: K+
Genre: Romance, Family, Fluff, Friendship
Warnings: None
Pairing: Korrasami
Characters: Korra, Asami, Mako, Bolin, Opal, Original Male Character
Summary: "Good night and joy be with you all."
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All names mentioned do not represent the true persons. All brand names do not belong to the author. No copyright laws or personal privacy laws are intended to be infringed.
A/N: Inspired by a combination of this: watch/?v=3hMdoGet2A8&start_at=4&end_at=196 and this: post/40325245261
It may not be enough to shake my depression… but it's a step in the right direction.
Of all the money that e'er I spent
I've spent it in good company
And all the harm that ever I did
Alas it was to none but me
It's a phenomenon of being the Avatar, perhaps, that Korra has never had to worry too much about finances and such. The White Lotus had always made sure that she was well-provided for. Asami and Opal, coming from wealthy families, were much the same. Oh, they had some sense of the worth of money, and took care to never be wasteful, but they had never tasted desperation, never seen a yuan not as a medium of trade but as the very source of life itself.
Mako and Bolin had. Well, more Mako than Bolin. Growing up on the streets, Mako had taken care to protect his brother from the worst that the Triad life had to offer. He'd wanted his little brother to have a childhood as free as possible from the harsh adult realities of the world. Thus, while Bolin learnt to respect the value of a yuan bill, only Mako had learnt the cost of a yuan in the slums of Republic City.
Mako had explained as much to Korra, back in the early days of their friendship. He'd explained about how, when people didn't trip over themselves in honour of the Avatar, most weren't so accommodating in their hospitality. Mako had pointed out that Korra had never known hardship, no matter how much she'd trained for it. He'd scoffed at the idea that the great and mighty Avatar would ever understand what it had been like as a street rat, the lowest of the low, the scum of the city who wasn't worth the spit from an elitist's tongue. As he'd so succinctly put it, "Korra, you're the Avatar. It's your job to save the world. It's the rest of us who have to actually live in it."
It was only now, years later, in the dusty backstreet markets of Omashu, bundled up tight against the dirt that billowed whenever the wind blew, penniless and hungry, that Korra fully understood what Mako had meant. Stranded from her raft, unable to bend beyond a tiny flame or a small pebble, Korra was trapped in a city without papers or pass, unable to leave. It had been four days since she'd eaten, twelve since she'd had a proper meal. The guards tolerated the many poor and homeless about as well as they tolerated the heat and flies, and dealt with them in much the same way: swatting at them as if they were pests to be trodden underfoot or chased into the dark corners of the world, to be ignored and forgotten.
Korra was eyeing a merchant intently. The man was boasting of the freshness of his produce, of how there were no apples in all of the Earth Kingdom close to the succulent richness of those in his stall. For all his smiles to the passer-bys who seemed to have coin, however, the merchant was viciously intolerant of any beggar who came within a stone's throw of his stand. Bad for business, he claimed, though Korra thought it had more to do with the layer of sandy dust settling atop his wrinkly apples than it did with the legless beggar holding his bowl up silently next to them.
Still, right now, those apples looked as tasty as the veritable feast served up at one of President Raiko's galas. Korra could practically feel herself start drooling at the imagined taste, the crunch of fruit, the wonderful peace of a settled stomach.
But she had no coin. No way of proving her identity. No way to challenge any guards, should they seize her as a thug or braggart. And, perhaps most importantly, no way of challenging the merchant himself should he call his brute from the back of the stall. The six-foot-tall mountain of a man had proven himself to be a formidable earthbender as well when a pickpocket had made the poor mistake of attempting to lift a few coins from the merchant's purse: no doubt he hadn't imagined that his ultimate fate would not be so different from the aforementioned legless beggar.
That left but one option. An option she had once scorned Mako for stooping too. And now, it seemed, that Korra herself was not so different, in the end.
"It seems that my sole legacy to the Avatar Cycle is seeing to what lows the Spirit of Raava can fall," Korra reflected as she raised her fingers.
A sudden burst of wind tossed up further sand, as well as dislodging the scarf wrapped around the merchant's neck. As he cursed and attempted to disentangle the scarf from around his eyes, the merchant failed to notice a dark-skinned Water Tribe girl wrapped tightly in Earth Kingdom green sneak up to his stall before dashing off into the side alleys, with little but a speckle of apple juice marring the cobblestones to mark that she had ever been there.
Fin