as easy as breathing
Korra is lying on the ground gasping for breath. One shoulder is dislocated and that arm is numb. She doesn't know whether to be scared or grateful.
Her good hand has its fingers clenched into the dirt-filled space between cobblestones, trying to keep her grip on consciousness, on this world. She things her fingers might be broken, but they still churn and scrabble well enough.
The earth no longer heeds her call anyway.
She was captured so, so long ago. They took away her bending.
Did you know that?
She sighed.
They took away what she had always thought would be hers to keep. Take away her parents? That was for the sake of her bending, to improve her ability to fight as the Avatar. Isolate her from all her peers? That was because her bending was too good. She was too much for the likes of those assholes anyway. Capture her new friends? No big deal. She could always just bust into any secret equalist hideout and break them all down them with her bending.
You know that Avatar Korra is nothing without her ability to control the elements.
They had outnumbered her. Spirits. She had been good. She had been great. She could have been the goddess of war herself but she could not always beat the odds every time. Eventually the odds fell upon her with a vengeance she did not understand.
Why?
She lay still and tried to breath.
Her ribs hurt. Bruised maybe. Cracked was likely. Broken was not prime.
They had kept her in a cell no bigger than a dog pen. They had kept her in a chamber so wide she could not see the door and could only listen to their footsteps, light-quick, pitter-patter.
At all times, she had been suspended from the earth, deprived of water, and kept beaten and broken to dampen the fire in her belly because they knew. They knew.
And then he reached out, while she was kept in chains that removed her from everything, and took away the best part of her.
Then they left her here. Broken inside (where did you go?) and so very whole on the outside. A dislocated shoulder. Nothing too drastic. But the half healed bruises and the deep cuts in too many places and the hunger that had shriveled up her stomach and the way her eyes could not open told her, she could not be moved.
She was to be the ultimate messenger.
You saw her, right? On the ground with nowhere to go and only the most essential, sublime, optimum parts of her scraped away with the proficient ease of a mad surgeon?
All gone. Everyone before her was the preview. She was the main show. There would be few to follow her.
And she breathed still. That was the worst part.
"Is...is tha' you Korra?"
A voice so used to bartering and scrabbling had softened in fear and in disbelieving anger. The growl was gone leaving just the soft undertones.
"We looked fer ya'. We dids we dids. Can ya move? I guess not. I'll get th' brothers. They'll know wha' to do with all this."
And then soft, quick steps across earth she couldn't feel was moving away and she breathed and breathed and wondered if someone could take this away just as easily.
Probably.