The fish spiral around one another in the shallow pool, smooth curves of white and black that slip in and out of clear visibility. The sun is beginning to set, dyeing the horizon with brilliant oranges and reds, while the crescent moon hangs suspended in the darkening sky like a promise of peaceful nights to come.
She is not deceived. It has always been a false promise.
"How long have I been here?" Kuvira says, her voice cracked and hoarse from hours of disuse.
"About three hours," Korra replies. "Are you concentrating?"
Kuvira inhales deeply, letting out her breath in measured intervals. "Of course, Korra."
The Avatar had requested her assistance on a mission to the North Pole. Years after her failed military campaign she was still working off her sentence, but with a new husband and newfound humility. She was no longer called the Great Uniter. Cities no longer fell at her feet, and citizens no longer begged for her for mercy and protection. Now, she served her country, rather than rule from a place of untouchable authority. She once had been the sun to her nation, a beacon of light that shone from high overhead, exposing filth and corruption but too far removed to deal with them in their entirety. Now, she worked from the ground up; she erected dwellings in the war-ravaged provinces of the west, sculpting fixtures and gears from ore she and her fellow convicts retrieved from the deep recesses of the earth. She knew the work was taxing, but she relished it as an upward trek to a purer contentment. She was helping her people- they were helping their people, just as they had wanted to when they left Zaofu so many years ago.
The fish are spiraling around and around one another with tireless grace, the boundaries of their scales blurring and melting until the white and black seemed a continuous whole. She feels her eyelids growing heavy, feels a thick drowsiness descend upon her, and as she beholds the physical manifestation of balance before her she is plunged into a memory.
"Kuvira?"
She jerked awake, a film of sweat covering her body and her heart racing, her hands fisted in the sheets and the coverlet kicked off the bed. "I'm fine," she said, her voice tiny in the dark room. "I'm fine."
"Kuvira, honey, you were thrashing around in your sleep," Su said gently. "Is everything okay?"
"Yes, I'm fine," she said. She sat up, her face hot from the night terrors and hotter from shame, and she felt the telltale soreness in the back of her throat that only ever came from swallowing tears. "I'm sorry to wake you up."
"Honey, it's okay," Su said, sinking down next to her and pulling her close. "It was just a bad dream, it's over now. Do you want to talk about it?"
Yes. "No," she heard herself say. "No, I'm fine." She had learned that her problems were not to be discussed, that there were more pressing matters to attend to, that no one was interested in listening... she had learned that before she had completed her first decade, and somehow she doubted Su would know what to do about reliving the night she was buried alive by the governor's soldiers while her parents looked on. Sometimes she felt the thick clay pressing against her skin and felt the steady compression at the command of the men, and she woke up with a strangled cry on her lips and her heart hammering frantically in her chest. Su's presence was a comfort, and always had been in the early days. But something about being on the cusp of her teenage years made her hesitant to admit to the nature of her nightmares, or to spend the night with Opal.
Su sighed, stroking her hair. "If you're sure, Kuvira. I'll be down the hall, okay?"
"Thank you, Su." She lay back on the pillow, forcing her heavy lids to stay open, wishing that she could become crepuscular, praying for a dreamless sleep or at least a nightmare that would spare her the embarrassment of frantic cries for help when she wakes.
It didn't work. It rarely did, and as she drifted off to sleep she felt the heaps of crumbled clay descending upon her and the squeezing sensation of the pit closing in around her-
"Kuvira!"
She jerks out of the trance, her fists clenched on her knees and beads of sweat on her brow. "What happened?" she demands, turning on the avatar. "That- I just-"
"Did you have a vision?" Korra prods. "Anything helping you see why you're having the nightmares?"
"I told you," she says, frustration spilling over into her voice, "it's nothing new. I've always had them, and they never went away. I'm just not used to sleeping alone-"
"I offered to bunk with you," Korra teases.
"I'm married."
"So am I, remember?" They sit in silence, watching the koi fish. "Try again."
She sighs, but this time it is easier. She sees the ageless symbol of balance in the circle of fins and curved bodies much more quickly this time, and slips into the next memory like slipping in and out of sleep.
She woke up with wide eyes and rapid breaths and frantic scrabbling at the bedclothes, but this time she is not alone. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, but she could already feel Baatar's chest against her back and his arm thrown over her waist, an anchor to the world outside the confines of her head.
"Kuvira?"
His voice was a deep rumble that she could feel as well as hear, and she rolled over to face him, cupping his cheek with her free hand. "Go back to sleep, Baatar."
"Why are you awake?" he asked, groggy and disoriented, and she instantly felt guilty for disturbing him. Long workdays and short nights were not uncommon for them both, now that the responsibility of fixing a nation fell exclusively to them. Sleep was already a luxury; interrupted sleep was a burden that did not need to be shared.
"No reason," she lied, her hand ghosting over his face and stroking his hair. "Go back to sleep."
And then he snapped alert, the tiredness gone from his eyes. "Another nightmare?" She was silent. "The usual one, or something else?"
"The usual," she said through gritted teeth. "It's fine, I'm fine-"
"Sure," he muttered sarcastically. "That's why you're breathing faster than a scared rabaroo and kicked me awake. Because you're fine."
"Baatar-"
"Shut up," he said, but his voice was gentle. "Let me."
She huffed in mock displeasure as he pulled her down to his chest, rolling onto his back and rearranging their entangled limbs. "I'm fine," she insisted, but she was grateful for the reassuring feel of his arm around her, his shoulder serving as a pillow and his fingers interlaced with hers atop his chest.
"Would it help if I had the mag-lev run more smoothly?" he asked, speaking in the soothing, quiet intonation he always used when she was roused from sleep by long-suppressed memories and haunting spectres of her childhood.
"You don't need to go to that trouble."
"I want to," he said, kissing her forehead. "I want to, if it'll help you sleep."
"You've done more for me than I could ever have imagined," Kuvira said slowly, her heart finally slowing and her breathing falling into time with his. "I can't ask that of you."
"It's not for you," he said, his blush visible even in the blue-black shadows of nighttime. "It's for me. Whenever you have a bad dream you kick like an ostrich horse. I can't work if I can't sleep."
"Well, I certainly wouldn't want to put a damper on your productivity," she murmured, grateful for his words. The last thought that registered before she drifted off again was the placement of her hand; it rested over Baatar's heart, her fingers twined with his.
She resurfaces, threads of calm winding over her. She tries again, this time without Korra's prompting.
The trance is different now; she feels herself floating between memory and the present, tethered to reality by a tenuous thread of consciousness shrouded in clouds of confused meditation. The koi fish circle one another in the spirit pool in black waters. Now that the sun has disappeared, night has painted the sky with a tapestry of midnight blue studded with silver. Kuvira wonders if fatigue has blurred the line between memory and the now, or if this is what proper meditation feels like. She has not slept properly since they left Ba Sing Se. She has not slept properly, she realizes, since she left a bed she was accustomed to sharing.
"Can you hear me?"
She is unsure if Korra is speaking or if it is her mother. Her mother, calling to her from above as clods of earth submerge her in the ground and her wide green eyes expand in her her face. "Can you hear me, Kuvira? Earthbend, it'll end once you do! We know you can, stop all this nonsense, get it over with!"
"Are you all right?"
The scene swims before her eyes. Her head is heavy, her vision blurred, her limbs leaden from sitting in one place for so long. She can't feel her feet. She feels the ditch compressing from the bottom to the top and her breath is quickening and her muscles tensing as she strains against the earth- she is eight years old again and reliving the reality that became an unceasing nightmare, long after the threat was gone. She hears the voice again and can't tell if it's Su or Baatar or Korra who is speaking. She is at once eight and twenty-eight, at once frantic with residual fear and calm in her appraisal of the memories. Her head is heavy and the miasma of wet red clay suddenly surrounds her.
There is a circle of black and white, equally proportioned, a splash of their opposite at the center of each. It floats before her in the spirit pool. And then she is floating, rising up from the recesses of her mind, the rational corner of her conscious swelling and bourn up through waves of anxiety and suppressed fears accumulated over the years. Too many years, she realizes.
"Kuvira! Are you okay?"
She feels her limbs relax, feels the pit of tension coiled in her abdomen dissipate, and the balance manifested before her in the spirit pool somehow diffuses into her body. And when she speaks there is honesty and gratitude and grudging respect in her voice, because she inexplicably knows the nighttime distresses will recede and dwindle away in the nights to come. Words come to her mouth unbidden, and exit with a frank honesty that rarely accompanies her talks regarding the night terrors.
"I'm fine," she hears herself say. And for the first time in far too long, it's the truth.
A/N: tried a different style. Idk.