Set immediately post-Aftermath. Spoilers ahoy!
It doesn't sink in for Asami until they get to Air Temple Island just what her father has done.
Smiling weakly but politely, she thanks her hosts for their kindness and tries to ignore her own light-headedness. She lets the hugely pregnant woman, Pema, lead her to a sparsely decorated room where she wants to fall onto the bed and sleep for weeks, but the muscle memory of her nightly routine leads her to the adjourning bathroom instead.
She manages to remove almost all of her makeup before she acknowledges the violent shaking of her hands.
Asami may not be able to bend but she has never felt this powerless, this fragile. The adrenaline of the evening's events has officially worn off; it hits her with all the force of a fistful of electricity what her father did, what she did. She grips the sink with white knuckles to stop the trembling and stares at herself in the mirror.
She wishes she looked less like her father.
It's mostly her mother's face that stares back, the one she knows from angelic photographs and portraits and her own fuzzy memories, but there are definite shades of Hiroshi, evidence of him that has always made her so proud until tonight. She has his smile, she knows; she'll have the same lines on her face in thirty years that she's memorized on his.
But it's the green of her eyes that she can't avoid looking at, the striking green that her mother gave her, that her father loves so much about her, that glowed back at her tonight from the goggles that the Equalists wore and she's suddenly stricken with the realization that Hiroshi must have designed that with her in mind.
Asami feels her hands shake and her throat tighten and her eyes sting and her chest burn where she delivered the blow to her father tonight, right on the heart, right where hers will never be the same. She starts to cry the way she hasn't since she was a little girl who didn't quite understand what Daddy meant when he said Mommy wasn't going coming home. She cries harder when she realizes that every time she's been this upset, her father's arms were waiting.
She hiccups and sobs and whines high in her throat like an animal. She cries off the rest of her makeup and she clutches her hair and feels the deep, solid sorrow of knowing that nothing, nothing, can ever be the same again. When her hands find her hair clip her mind sees Hiroshi's smiling face on her thirteenth birthday, giving her the barrette and telling her, You look more and more like your mother every day.
In that moment she wants nothing more than to run out to the cliffside and throw the stupid clip into Yue Bay. She wants to hate her father with her entire being, for lying to her, for allying himself with a monster like Amon, for trying to hurt her friends.
Asami wants to hate him so badly, but she can't. When she said I love you, Dad she meant it, no matter now much she wishes she didn't.
It's a while before she can get to sleep, but when she does she dreams of a phantom kiss on her forehead and a familiar voice telling her that she's a Sato, and Satos make it through.
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Jax