The hardest part was that first day after waking.
Asami Sato was a logical person. Logic applied to everything, from the cold mechanisms assembled in her factories to the ethereal transformations of the Spirit World. Confusion had a simple cure. You gathered information on your surroundings, applied what you learned to the rules you know to exist, and you figure out how the two coexist.
When she opened her eyes to discover an unfamiliar setting, she stretched her neck to the right, waiting for the uncomfortable click down her aching back that developed a decade ago. No matter how she worked the muscles, the click did not come. Neither did the pain in her shoulders when she sat up. A brisk, chilly wind ruffled her hair, but her joints did not ache.
She began logically dissecting her circumstances and reconnecting the pieces one by one. Fleeting images floated hazily at the corner of her vision. Images of unadorned white walls, white sheets, a white ceiling beckoning to her. She remembered water flowing over her skin, hot as a welder and cold as the South Pole. Hosts of fingers gripped her hands; some were long, some were short, some sweated as if in a sauna and some were dry as a desert. Asami's eyes had drifted shut. Something wet had splashed onto the rough fabric of an unfamiliar sleeve.
Smooth, ivory flesh covered hands that did not shake and were liberated of the trembles and wrinkles of experience. Asami took a deep breath, but the air found no lungs. She was a logical person. There was a single logical conclusion. She was dead.
Asami screamed.
Hours passed. Days. When Asami realized she couldn't tell, that there was no sun journeying across the sky or hunger growling in her stomach, that entire lifetimes may have passed in the moment she screamed, she only screamed all the louder.
Decades, centuries passed before she stood on legs inhumanly free of grieving wobbling, of the physical weakness common to emotional pain. She took her first real look at her unstable surroundings, fluctuating like a teenage mood. Like the most violent recesses of the Spirit World run amok. The first step had always proven the most difficult in life. Waking the morning after her mother's cruel murder. Following down her father's path. Stepping away from that path when the trees to either side blackened with corruption. Forgiveness, friendship, family. Her company. Her wife. It was only fitting that the afterlife's first step try her as well.
Asami wondered aimlessly through an aimless world lacking solid structure or form. Rivers flowed uphill and froze atop mountains. Ice hung steaming and dripping from barren desert cliffs, while cactus froze. Fish walked on land. Birds swam in lakes. She wandered, frightened. Asami was a woman of logic in a realm devoid of it.
She cupped a handful of icy blue and found she had no thirst to quench. She stared past the reflection in the mirroring surface, past the green eyes set in a young face she'd nearly forgotten. She focused on the shimmering blue, trying to remember why it was so familiar. Her eyes traveled across the lake to the opposite shore.
Deeper blue wrapped firmly around a specter standing beside the waters. Asami furrowed her brows and squinted. The blue of the lake reflected beside lonely sorrow in eyes of pure beauty. A name formed on her lips, like a single learned word of an ancient language forgotten long ago, its meaning lost. The specter faded into the emptiness beyond the lake. Asami blinked and continued on.
Millennia passed. Asami traversed canyons with cliffs of frozen water and rolling hills of shimmering lava that felt cool on her bare feet. She swam through the sky and walked along ocean floors. Endless days became endless nights. Winters marched cold beside steaming summers.
She could feel the atrophy within, her soul begging for sustenance she could not name or provide. A gnawing within her mind that dragged her along. A search leading her down a path with an end she could not see. Was this the afterlife? A cruel, meaningless meandering in the name of something unidentifiable? Asami tried to choose. She would stop in place, get off her feet, and refuse the next step, or any other step. Time would pass. She would stand, plucked to her feet, and take that next difficult step.
Sometimes she saw the blue eyes, a reminder of something; she always stood opposite and apart. Korra, Asami remembered, though she still struggled to decipher the importance hidden within the sounds. She would call the name, but the blue-swathed specter either could not hear or did not listen. Time passed quickly and not at all.
After one such encounter, Korra began to leave behind mementos. Rippling rainbow leaves with colors that rippled like gentle waves. Blocks of ice cut into fantastical shapes. Roaring flames of purple and red gave off no heat but provided comfort. One time she left behind a ripped cut of blue fabric, presumably from her clothing. Asami did not hesitate to tie it around her wrist. She did not understand, either.
There was no one else. Memories withered and blew away in the wind. She had…a son? A daughter? Her eyes were…amber? Or blue, like Korra's? She tried to remember, and only forgot more. Someone had once told her she would see them again in the afterlife. If she focused enough, she could remember hair dark as midnight and ruby lips. Was that her? But that wouldn't make sense. She would not have promised to reunite with herself. Then she would see a mustache, and fury melted away to sorrow.
A long day passed within a dry forest of wet coral. Asami ate crystal fruits. No hunger was sated, but she found comfort in the chewing and swallowing, a whisper of a reality she'd nearly forgotten and did not want to. Her eyes drifted shut. When they opened again, entirely aware of the passage of time, Korra stood over her.
Rough, cracked lips gaped open. Muscled arms crossed over a chest. Stray, messy strands of earthy hair hung limp over searching eyes, trying hard to solve a puzzle whose complexity had grown unruly. Eyes that peeled the flesh from Asami's bones in search of the truth beneath. Eyes that Asami could not look away from.
She managed somehow, only to lock on a strip of color tied around Korra's right arm. A strip of black and red gone stiff from dried blood. Korra.
Cracked lips widened into a smile. "Asami."
Strong hands pulled Asami to her feet. She remembered that strength. That grip. Korra's face twitched and trembled. "I promised. I promised you." She pulled the material from around her arm and held it out. "I promised."
Korra. Korra. Asami wrapped her arms around her wife. Her wife. A blue sky glowed above. "It was you," she whispered. "I was looking for you."
"You found me."
Asami held Korra tightly.
"You'll never have to find me again."
Avatar never really talks about the afterlife, so I went with something like the Spirit World, only even stranger and more unsettled.