A/N: Oops. Chapter creep happened. I was going to make it one chapter, but it started getting pretty long, and I'm going out of town and probably won't be able to post for a while, so I wanted to get this up. It's a bit unedited. Sorry! Only one more chapter, I promise. And right now it looks like there will also be a sequel. Because why not ;) And potentially some one-shot prequels. We'll see!
Sometimes, at night, she dreams in gray.
Asami Sato doesn't usually remember her dreams. She remembers being a child and asking her father—
Her father—
(Her brain skips on the words.)
-She remembers asking - what it's like to dream. The most she ever remembers is vague impressions, colors swirling in and around one another, lightning crossing behind her eyelids like circuits as her overworked brain repeats drafting patterns over and over again. She'd been disappointed as a child to hear other people's stories of amazing adventures. She'd been disappointed to close her eyes at night and see nothing.
Lately, when she does dream, it's gray, and loud. There are vague impressions of debris, and fear, and running. (Asami Sato is good at running.)
(Asami Sato does not think about what the dreams mean.)
Today, Asami Sato is trying to forget the gray. She abandons the polished gray of chrome and instead makes her way to a new project.
On the mannequin in front of her is a skin-tight red suit.
Zhu Li is waiting nearby with a clipboard. "Councilman Tenzin is waiting, ma'am."
Asami looks at the wingsuit, trying to burn the bright red into her mind, trying to drive out the gray.
It doesn't work.
Sighing, she turns to Zhu Li. "Please send him out to the test course."
The first test fails.
Tenzin's body hurtles into the inflatable air bag, affectionately titled "The Blob," and she watches the red figure bounce a few times. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she tries to ignore the calm, but irritatingly constant presence of Zhu Li. Not that she didn't appreciate her help while Varrick was off doing who knows what for that woman—
"Ma'am?"
Asami does what she does best and forces herself to think. She's found herself easily annoyed, recently, and it was making it difficult to work on extended projects. Particularly ones that had no immediate return investment, much to her stockholders' annoyance. Thinking, though, iss safe.
Doing a few brief mental calculations, she asks Zhu Li to order a different fabric with a higher concentration of spandex.
It's the first of many failures.
Asami Sato is good at running away.
Right now, she's thankful for it, as she dodges away from a Triad member's overzealous fireball and off the edge of the low roof. Tucking and rolling to soften the landing, she eventually springs to her feet and wheels around with her glove ready, certain he's in pursuit—
Only to see his body viciously knocked from the air by a fast-moving object. It hits the ground with a sickening crunch.
A metal ball drops onto his body.
Asami turns away before the ball's owner steps into view. Activating her eyepiece, she types in a few code words for the self-starter on the newest, experimental Satomobile and makes her way down the alley.
"Leaving so soon, Miss Sato?"
She continues to walk away as she replies, the familiar irritation making her head pound. "I have to return to my company." Another trial with Tenzin was scheduled later, and he was also bringing one or two of his children along to test the smaller models. Hopefully, their smaller, less dense bodies might actually provide her with more data to work with.
"The wingsuits again? You know as well as I do that they're a waste of time and money."
Asami stops. She knows what's coming.
Her father—
Her father—
"Your father built your empire on weapons, Miss Sato. Surely that technology still exists somewhere."
Refusing to turn, Asami waits for her Satomobile to geolocate her and arrive. Considering the network of alleys and rooftops she climbed to get here, it would most likely take…
(Her mind runs calculations to ignore the presence of the other woman at her back.)
…Approximately 1.3 more minutes.
Shit.
"Surely it would be better for all of us, in Republic City and the world, if we had better weapons and powers to strike back against terrorist threats."
Clenching her fists, Asami turns slowly on her heel. Underneath the thick sole, she can just barely feel loose pavement crunch under her boot.
She finishes turning and looks the other woman in the eye.
Clad in her metal and green uniform is the Great Uniter, eyebrows angled up and hands clasped behind her back. The metal ball is hanging in the air just behind her and Asami swears she sees a bloodstain on it.
It's been two years since the Avatar left, and her absence has left a conspicuous vacuum in Republic City. One filled by murderers, gangs, and now…this superhero.
If one could even call her that.
"I don't make weapons," Asami says. Her voice is calm; it's the trained voice her publicist has taught her, even and controlled just in the middle of her throat. Not too high, not too low. Not a single tremor.
"But you could." In the background, Asami makes out a few other people in green shirts milling about the alley.
Her eyepiece is counting down to the arrival of her Satomobile.
Twenty-two seconds.
"I'm sorry to cut this short, Great Uniter," the name is acid on her tongue, "but I have work I need to do, and people to help." She turns again just as she hears her car rumbling up the alley.
"We could help more people with you on our side!" she hears from behind her, the deep voice easily cutting across the higher hum of her car's electric motor as it approaches. "We could save the world! The Great Uniter and Future Industries—uniting us toward a common future—"
Asami vaults into her car over the door, and spares a final, cool glance for the other woman. "I'm sorry, but I'm no one's sidekick."
The sentence feels heavy in her mouth, and she watches the other woman's eyebrows raise in surprise.
Ashamed, suddenly, of losing her temper, even slightly, Asami guns the engine and tears out of the alley.
Her father.
Asami writes the Avatar a letter that night. Tenzin had indicated he had some way of contacting her. She's kept her distance, until now, something about the gray and the dust having kept her from putting pen to paper.
If she writes, she'll remember.
Asami doesn't want to remember.
Yet, there's a part of her that does, too—a part of her that longs for the adventure, the mayhem, the careless, crooked grin. It all seems a lifetime ago. She's not old, but she feels impossibly aged in that moment, thinking about how young both of them had been. Barely out of adolescence, hot-headed and brave and stupid, running into danger over and over again.
Suffering, over and over again.
Asami should have known it wouldn't last long.
She hasn't heard from the Avatar at all. She doesn't even know if Tenzin would have thought to give her her contact information. They were barely even friends, before Zaheer; now, they may as well be strangers. How much have they changed, in their time apart? How much did they even know each other to begin with?
Asami feels, sometimes, that she's deluded herself into imagining some kind of closeness between them, that she's just imagined she could read the signs of the Avatar's body in the tensing of a fist, or a twitch of the corner of her mouth, or in the particular pitch of her laugh that day. That the Avatar has a particular laugh with her, even, away from Mako or Bolin or the Chief, just the two of them dangling their feet off of rooftops and listening to the cacophony of radios and cars and voices of the city as a hundred tiny lights blinked into and out of existence like twinkling stars, the real ones no longer visible from light pollution. But they hadn't needed them, not up there, not together, with their elbows just barely touching, the hum of a long day of adventure finally drifting away in the comfortable silence.
Asami feels she's deluded herself about a lot of things.
I'm nobody's sidekick. Well, maybe she'd never been one, anyway. She always forgets, conveniently, all the times the Avatar tried to keep her out of some of their missions, how sometimes she'd been sidelined as a driver while Mako and Bolin took care of whatever was going on.
Maybe the Avatar had never really liked her to begin with.
Asami presses her lips together firmly and feels her lipstick stick for a moment on her bottom lip. Think.
Her pen presses to paper, and she composes a letter, all the while speaking it to herself in that calm, measured publicist's voice.
Dear Korra,
I miss you.
Her pen hovers over the words. It is a little too honest, but they are there, now, and she finds herself suddenly unwilling to take them back.
Missing doesn't necessarily mean anything, right?
(Asami is so, so good at running away, even in her own mind.)
It's not the same in Republic City without you.
She hesitates, considering mentioning the Great Uniter.
But she remembers, sometimes, the pinch of self-doubt in the lines of the Avatar's mouth, the self-recrimination when they'd been fighting Amon, the agony as she realized an entire population of people in the city had felt unsafe and oppressed.
Briefly tightening her fingers at the memory, she takes a deep breath. Think. She moves on.
How are you feeling?
It's probably a silly question, but Asami can't help but ask. Reports from Tenzin had been worrying. Something about the Avatar not having use of her legs, or even her powers, really. (Somewhere, under the pile of wingsuit designs, is a sketch of an electric wheelchair, one suited specifically for the Avatar's skills and taste for adventure. She tells herself that's why she's asking—to get more data, for this secret, half-formed project barely more than an idea at this point.)
Things are going well here.
She hears her publicist's voice in that one, but the lie is so much better than the truth, and she's not even sure the Avatar would want to hear the truth, anyway.
I just got a big contract to help redesign the city's infrastructure, so I'll be keeping pretty busy for a while.
A city that integrates superheroes with civilians, benders and non-benders. It's the main project bringing her income, right now, and she wants to feel passionate about it, she really does, but all it reminds her of is the slow remodeling they had to do after Zaheer, and the Red Lotus, and all the places Asami measured the impacts left by the Avatar's body.
She hesitates, having run out of things to say. Her life really isn't that interesting anymore, since the Great Uniter has taken over most of the superhero work. Especially now that she's completed the wingsuits.
Be well, Avatar.
A. Sato
She folds the letter into the envelope and presses it to her forehead for a long while. The clock ticks in the background, and it is utterly silent in the mansion.
Asami doesn't move for a long time.
The Avatar writes back, and for the first time since her father went to jail, Asami cries.
It is a controlled cry, something she allows herself for just a few minutes, late one night down in the garage. She has dirt up to her elbows and a new burn mark or two on her hands from soldering wires together too hastily. She'd refused to let herself read the letter until she was done for the night.
Already marred by a teardrop or two, the letter reads:
Asami,
I'm sorry I haven't written to you sooner, but every time I've tried, I never know what to say.
For a moment, she simply rereads that first sentence over and over again, tracing the bold, slightly uneven writing. She wonders what might be so difficult for the Avatar to say, then wonders why she's wondering about that, or why there's a weird little feeling of hope in the base of her skull.
She shakes her head and moves on.
The past two years have been the hardest of my life. Even though I can get around fine now, I still don't have complete control over my powers, yet. I keep having visions of Zaheer and what happened that day.
Asami's hand clenches around the letter, and she sees, briefly, the flash of gray as concrete breaks and trembles at the impact of the Avatar's body.
The doctor here thinks a lot of this is in my head, so I've been trying meditation lot—
Asami reads between the lines. It's what she's always had to do. Over the last year, they've carefully danced around their real selves. The Avatar and Asami Sato, CEO and Professional Genius. Except both know that isn't the whole story, but they have no choice to address each other that way, living in a world whose currency is information.
The doctor here thinks a lot of this is in my head.
In her mind, she pictures that day, the Avatar's glowing eyes as what had apparently been poison set in, activating some uncontrollable superpower. She wonders if there's a difference between poisoning someone's body and poisoning someone's mind.
(Sometimes she feels like her mind was poisoned that day by gray, and helplessness.)
It helps. A little.
Still, I worry I'll never fully recover. Please don't tell Mako and Bolin I wrote to you and not them. I don't want to hurt their feelings, but it's easier to tell you this stuff. I don't think they'd understand.
(The image appears again, of them on the rooftop, the twinkling starlights of a hundred windows and lives moving about the city, the steady hum of the engines, far enough below that there is a comfortable silence between them. The hesitant brush of limb against limb, maybe accidental, maybe not, but it doesn't matter either way, up here, in this other world. Just the two of them.)
Try to stay safe. Tenzin has told me some of what's going on.
I worry about you.
There is a single character signed at the bottom, which could mean different things depending on the context.
Asami stares at the hastily scrawled character for a long time. It is the only clue she has to the Avatar's life outside of her title, and she traces the lines of the character to memorize them in her mind.
The clock ticks in the background, somehow only exaggerating the stillness of the workshop.
(She has always liked the steady rhythm. It grounds her, somehow. But not tonight.)
She presses the letter to her chest and sits in silence, imagining a rooftop, impossibly high, and the warm sky of the city lit by a halo of activity from below.
She misses being nineteen, and silly, and hopelessly following a superhero around for—
For what, she won't admit yet.
The silence of her workshop is answer enough, for now.
The Avatar is missing.
It is a refrain that thrums in the back of Asami's mind, rhythmically pounding regret and fear and distress and hurt into her thoughts.
The Avatar is missing.
It's been too much, these last months. The wild hope, the expectation, at hearing she would return soon—only to have arrived at the docks with Tenzin and Mako and Bolin and to have found not the Avatar, but the Avatar's father.
The Avatar is missing, and things have fallen apart. In the city, now swarmed by troops, superpowered and ordinary alike. In her life, as she's retreated further into her workshop despite the eventual success of the wingsuit.
(And, a part of Asami whispers quietly, she's fallen apart in places deeper and darker than her workshop, places she doesn't want to acknowledge exist.)
Asami dodges a ball of metal. It careens wildly into the building behind her, showering the street with concrete and glass.
The Avatar is missing, but it's fine. It's fine. It's fine.
(Asami Sato is no one's sidekick.)
The Great Uniter lazily flicks metal bands at Asami. A chunk of earth flies across her field of vision, the metal gripping into the face of the rock as it tumbles to the ground. From her other side, a ball of flame jets at the woman, who merely tilts to the side. Mako's shot singes her hair, but otherwise passes into the air like a distant comet, fizzling out some yards away.
For whatever purpose, the Great Uniter always keeps her face and head uncovered. It's something that Asami thinks about, sometimes, while she's in her workshop trying to draft something, anything that could help them.
It suggests either that she is overly confident, convinced that even if others knew her identity, she would never come to harm, or it suggests the woman doesn't have an identity to protect.
In some way, the Great Uniter's transparency in all but name seems like a weakness, but Asami can't put her finger on why. And she is hesitant to exploit the vulnerability.
She doesn't have an answer for that, either, except that when she thinks about it, thinks about the technology for facial recognition now proliferating through databases just at the tips of her fingers, she can't bring herself to do anything about it.
(In the back of her mind, she knows it has something to do with the image of the Avatar's father, covering her face protectively – something to do with the blood and the brokenness of the other woman's body, the vulnerability.)
(Asami cannot bring herself to exploit that.)
Tucking forward into a tight roll, Asami brings her fist up with a jet of electricity arcing off of it. She manages to catch the metal edge of the woman's sleeve with a bolt of electric blue as she rises from her roll. The Great Uniter rears back in pain, her foot stamping the ground, and then something hard and fast strikes Asami's chin. She reels back from the blow—concrete, she thinks, wondering how there could possibly be enough earth in the substance for the woman to manipulate at all—and falls back. The buzzing in her ears conceals the majority of the ensuing scuffle she hears between the brothers and the super villain, and there are grunts and slams and the hissing of flames, and then all of a sudden everything stops.
A muted quiet has fallen over the street, and Asami begins to sit up. The buzzing has stopped, and for an absurd moment she thinks she's somehow gone deaf, but then in the distance she hears a siren and the yells of the Chief's officers as they fight against the Uniter's supporters. Her army of green and metal and near fanaticism has probably seized most government buildings by now.
Her vision is somewhat blurry, and she vaguely makes out the discarded chunk of concrete lying on the ground in front of her.
Raising her eyes, she sees the Great Uniter is standing with an odd expression on her face, one hand raised—the one Asami shocked is hanging limply, occasionally twitching, she notices with a rather ungenerous sense of satisfaction—and she's looking at something…someone…
But it's all wrong, because instead of blue there's green and instead of a proud confidence there is terror. Asami follows that familiar jawline and sees no determined set, just a small tremor visible even from her position several yards away.
Still—
Still…
Asami is looking at the Avatar, and she is alive and whole and real, and even though Asami knew that, she's always worried that maybe she was somehow dreaming it all up. The adventure, the talks, the brushing of elbows, the teasing bickering. And looking back on it all, something has changed now in the way Asami looks at her; something else has grown up just underneath her ribcage –
I worry about you—
"Avatar," the Great Uniter says, and the word is somewhere between gloating and mocking and something else—something almost hesitant.
Avatar.
Asami is torn between the stupid little giddiness in her heart that feels like long nights spent on rooftops watching the starless sky and a very real, very sudden fear.
She feels her eyes begin to burn. Vaguely, she hears Bolin yelling and cheering, but he doesn't see what she sees. He doesn't see the Avatar lying broken, cradled by her father; he doesn't see I'll never fully recover; he doesn't see the tremor in her jaw, the compulsive, nervous clenching of her fists.
The Avatar gazes straight ahead, just over the Great Uniter's shoulder. "I can't let you hurt the people in Republic City anymore." The words are tired.
I'll never fully recover.
"Fight me, then," the Great Uniter taunts, hesitance gone, and it's obvious she's seen exactly what Asami's seen. "You and me. No one else needs to get hurt. Stop me, Avatar." Her eyebrow lifts as she crouches into a firm stance. There is a taunt in her voice, a daring, an arrogance that grates at Asami.
There is still that lingering fear, too, because for the first time, she is not sure the Avatar can win. She finally lifts herself to her feet and casts a hesitant look at the Avatar, lifting her gloved fist. The other woman shakes her head shallowly, and Asami stands for a moment, the emotions of the day pounding through her blood, before she reluctantly joins Mako and Bolin to the side.
Wordlessly, the Avatar mirrors Kuvira's stance, eyebrows furrowing above a green mask. Her fists shake in front of her. The Great Uniter waits, assessing, then strikes like a snake, all quickness and agility but with strength waiting just at the end of her fist.
The Avatar charges forward to meet her.
