Okay. This sort of semi-romantic narrative has been stewing inside me since I watched season 2 of Korra. The final moments of the season 4 finale have left me too wonky and fangirlish not to proceed with... whatever this is. Now that I have some spare time for Christmas, it may be my chance to be needlessly prolific. But enjoy, I guess, and review if you want.

"You have to hold the tarp like this, not this…" Asami was adamant.

Korra sighed and draped the generous tarpaulin between two massive, sturdy fungi. They looked like they may have been normal mushrooms at one point in their existence, but had since cast off any semblance of familiar worldliness.

They were, after all, spirit mushrooms. Korra wondered how they tasted.

"I don't get why we have to put this thing up anyway, it's not like it's gonna rain," she said.

Asami raised her eyebrows and shook her head. "You never know. It's always good to prepare for anything. Or else…" she trailed off, and Korra didn't urge her to continue. Asami sometimes wandered down paths of thought that Korra feared following. Whether or not she was unwelcome in the darker paths of Asami's mind or if she was incapable of helping Asami navigate these paths, she didn't know. Either way, Asami's unsure voice left a pained silence hovering between them.

Korra decided to break it. She sat down under the tarp and began to unpack her things: extra clothes, her sleeping mat, their dinner for that night. "You know that the weather and climate are dependent on me, right?"

Asami knelt beside her. "Oh really? You're that important?"

Korra grinned. "You forgot? I'm the Avatar and stuff." Korra bent some water from the air and filled their noodle cups. It felt strange to be in the heart of all the world's spirituality and still be eating instant noodles straight from an assembly line. Many things lately had been strange. "When I was here once before… I got lost, really lost. The sky turned dark and the spirits started acting weird around me. Turned out that the spirit world is responsive to emotions. Especially the Avatar's emotions."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." Korra reached out and squeezed Asami's elbow, lightly. "And I'm the most content I've ever been. So that's why it's not gonna rain."

Asami rested her head on Korra's shoulder. "I think this place beautiful anyway. I don't care if it rains or not." She tilted her face up, smiling. "Or if it's mad or disappointed or afraid."

This was their second night in the spirit world. They had set up camp on a mild green hillside, overlooking a benign forest that stretched for miles—or, whatever substitute for miles they had in the spirit world. Many of the physical properties of the place had never been studied or understood. After all, not too many humans had entered this realm and apparently very few of them were scientists.

The anomalous physical qualities of this world were what Asami was most interested in. So far she had spent hours jotting down notes in her little leather book. She had played so many roles these past two days: tourist, illustrator, cartographer, engineer, theorist. Every night, after the sun went down (the sun was of special interest to her: "Korra, how does the sun go down in the spirit world? Is it a spirit sun? Does the spirit world even turn?"), Korra would nurse a flame at the end of her finger in lieu of a candle, and she would watch Asami write, draw, calculate, and speculate.

Korra wished she could answer some of her questions. Asami was a woman who drank knowledge like water, and Korra wasn't exactly a spring of wisdom herself. But Asami wouldn't die of thirst out here; there was one particular place Korra had in mind for the climax and turn-around point of their trip, somewhere that Asami would absolutely adore, if only they could convince that stuffy librarian to let them in…

"Korra? Did you hear me?" Asami asked.

"Huh?"

Asami's smile warmed her like no flame could. "I said, I'm really happy you took me here."

"Me too."

They lay down and watched the sun (or whatever it was) set (or whatever it did). Korra had never thought about the spirit world in this much depth before, at least not until Asami came here with her, eager to work out the gritty details. Korra had always been a disappointingly unspiritual—and so far relatively unscientific—Avatar. And now she was in the spiritual core of her world, in the company of the most brilliant person she knew. She still had so much to learn about this place, about herself, about everything. For a moment, she wished she could be only half as knowledgeable as Asami.

"We're watching the stars tonight," Asami said when darkness fell over the land like a silk sheet. "I'm charting them. They're not the same as they are back home."

"Really? I never noticed. I'm not too familiar with the sky here."

"Who is supposed to be guiding whom around here?" Asami laughed.

Korra leant her an arm on which to rest her head, and they watched the sky turn high above them. Asami had left her book in her bag, and insisted that tonight, she just wanted to enjoy the view in complete darkness for a while.

"Do you want to know about stars?" Asami asked.

"Hmm," Korra answered, closing her eyes.

"Well, at the university in Ba Sing Se, they recently developed a way of figuring out what stars are made of. You know how the radio works, don't you?"

"Hmm."

"Well, then you know that radio waves are just electromagnetic radiation. Light works the same way—in fact, light and radio waves are the same thing, it's just that visible light and radio waves have different frequencies. Anyway, if you send these waves through a grating, the waves split up and you get a series of interference lines—imagine lining up a bunch of planks, spacing them apart only slightly, and sending a wave of water through… I suppose you didn't have to learn this is school, did you? Being the Avatar, and all."

"Nope." Korra's head bobbed forward and she yawned.

"Well, anyway, it turns out that some chemicals absorb certain waves of light, some reflect certain others, and by examining which stars emit certain wavelengths, which ones don't, you can get a good idea of what they're made of. For example, if you have a star that emits a spectrum of light but is missing parts of the red, yellow and green... essentially subtract the... line up... for... ..."

Korra dreamt of stars that night. At first she was floating in the clear, cool darkness, surrounded by millions of infinitely small dots of light. She twisted her weightless body around, smiling, trying to count them all, tracing the lines and smudges they drew in the blackness. She thought she could keep this up forever, but two especially luminous ones caught her eye and she forgot numbers completely. The two stars brightened, turning from a gentle yellow to a piercing, painful white, and they grew, grew rapidly, as if they were flying toward her faster than she could possibly comprehend.

She covered her face, expecting to be swallowed by the harsh light, but when she lowered her arms she saw that the two stars hovered before her, uncomfortably close and impossibly small. She narrowed her eyes and leaned toward them, looking deep into their light. In an instant, she realized that inside the two small orbs lay her spirit, and the spirits of her predecessors. She then knew that the stars were not stars at all, but a pair of eyes, burning with the lives and souls of a thousand Avatars.

Korra reached out, her incomprehensible dream-logic pushing her forward, thinking that if she could at least touch those eyes she could find out what they wanted, why they were here. Before she could lay her finger between the two dots of infinite white, a voice circled around her, soft and sad, but deliberate.

He will steal the face of the one you love.

In a flash of blurred color, Korra made out a black wave, a swirl of blue cloth, animal skin, a dark, shadowed face. For a moment thought it was the face of her father.

Steal the face

"Wait," she cried, but no sound came out.

…you love…

When Korra opened her eyes, she heard the tapping of water on the tarpaulin. She looked up to see Asami's worried face hovering over hers.

"You okay?" she asked, laying a hand on Korra's sweaty forehead.

"Yeah," Korra answered. She looked to the sky and found that the clear expanse of stars was smothered in thick storm clouds. The rain came down hard, soaking the ground and sliding off the giant bells of the spirit mushrooms.

Asami scooted closer, squeezing her arm comfortingly. "Good thing we brought the tarp."