Weeks continued to pass with Kuvira reduced down to exercise, reading, and pretending that her new set of guards weren't watching her twenty-four/seven. Korra's visits had gone from a highlight of the week to something she genuinely looked forward to, like metalbending lessons when she was a kid.

Korra walked in empty handed that week.

"Hey, so I realized that I forgot the Pai Sho board, so I'm going off on a limb here: want to exercise together? I don't know, if I were stuck in here, I'd miss training, but maybe you were a solitary trainer anyway…"

She hadn't exercised with anyone since her days as a dancer; Baatar didn't like Kuvira showing him up, so they never exercised together.

She looked to Korra, unsure of what to say. Part of her yearned for that bit of nostalgia and a different pace, but she still wasn't comfortable with showing Korra too much vulnerability. Besides, it felt…intimate. If not for Korra, for her.

"I don't know if we're…close enough yet."

"C'mon, it's not like I'm marrying you," Korra joked.

They started with something simple that involved neither of them touching.

"I saw you're front page news," Kuvira said right before they started their first set of planks.

"In a newspaper?"

"A gossip magazine."

Korra laughed. "You read those?"

Kuvira rolled her eyes. "I asked for a newspaper, and apparently these guards are so depraved that they got a kick out of giving me something else."

"What'd the magazine say?"

Kuvira waited until her still underworked core stopped shaking. "That you and the CEO of Future Industries are dating."

Kuvira caught the Avatar blushing. "Sound reporting."

"I never knew you were—"

"Bi?"

"Dating within your team."

"Oh, well, I've technically dated everyone in my group of friends. Being too close for too long does that." Korra smiled. "I mean, you dated within your inner circle."

"One person."

"That's enough for my point."

Kuvira focused back on the plank. "We were childhood friends. He was awkward and antisocial, and I was the only girl he saw on a regular basis aside from his sister and mother. It was bound to happen."

"Well, I like to think Asami and I were bound to happen."

"How long have you known her? Just since the Equalist movement?"

"You know about that?"

"We get news in Zaofu. Besides, Su was concerned for Lin when the revolution got out of hand, and she'd be talking about it every time I talked to her."

"Yeah, Asami and I met then." Korra paused. "But, we sort of met as romantic rivals. She started dating Mako when I still had this huge crush on him."

Kuvira raised a brow. "And you two didn't kill each other?"

They dropped their plank and Korra rolled into a sitting position. "It got a bit hairy, but we never really blamed each other as much as we blamed Mako. And, by the time the air benders came back, we were good friends." She paused. "It felt good to have a girl friend, and I guess it just developed past that. Sit ups?"

Kuvira sighed; she supposed she owed Korra some trust for all she'd done. "Sure."

When Korra didn't move, Kuvira took the sit up position and Korra leaned her weight onto Kuvira's feet. It felt so strange having a human's warmth on her again. It reminded her of her friends in Su's dance troupe, a sort of distant comfort. She ought to start dancing again soon.

"When did you and Baatar Jr. get together?"

She hadn't thought about it in a while. In fact, she still hadn't read that letter, and the best bet she could give was that it was from Baatar venting his emotions. She was almost ready to admit that she was scared to open it.

"The…attraction was there all through the initial planning to leave Zaofu, but we never acted upon anything. There was just too much to do. We formally got together after we secured Ba Sing Se. There was a celebration, he asked me to dance, and kissed me on the floor. It was before I started adapting to the obstacles involved in the campaign. But, it wasn't long after. We kept any affection behind closed doors. I had to maintain appearances, and romance would be an obvious sign of vulnerability."

The burn of the sit ups felt so good; she could almost ignore how she had never talked about Baatar with anyone. "I think it just makes you human. More relatable."

"Bandits don't respond kindly to 'relatable.'"

Korra smiled. "They rip your shoulder out of its socket?"

Kuvira couldn't help but smile at the memory. "And Baatar leaves the room, leaving a soldier to help me pop it back in."

"Did Baatar even go into battle?"

"No. He created, not fought. There would've been no reason to risk his life in the squabbles to unify the Earth Kingdom. He liked to keep fit, though."

"But you were always stronger than him, right?"

"Yes."

"Did he have a hard time with it?"

"Did Mako?"

Korra started laughing, and Kuvira only resisted because she was mid-sit up.

"I brought up Asami so you'd be talking," Kuvira said. "Let's switch."

They switched, and Korra brought the conversation back. "Well, we just decided to go on vacation after Varrick's wedding."

"Varrick survived?"

There was a long silence. "The Hummingbird you destroyed had Asami's father in it."

One more life she completely and utterly destroyed while drunk on power. It had been semi-okay thinking Varrick had died because he didn't actually have anyone who relied on him or really cared about him besides Zhu Li, who assumedly had died with him.

"I'll ask you to tell her that I'm sorry, but it wouldn't mean much now."

"She never begrudged the triad that killed her mother, so I imagine she'll come around eventually."

"Did you…tell her about visiting me?"

Korra exhaled. "No. Our relationship is still so new, and I don't want to ruin the dynamic we've got right now."

"By lying to her? Where does she think you go once a week?"

"Visiting with Beifong." Korra glanced at the mirror on the wall. "It's technically true."

"Take it from me: just tell her and accept the tension. If she really loves you, she'd understand why you're doing what you're doing."

Korra smiled. "You just want me to keep coming."

She looked away. "You're the one coming in each week."

"Also, should I really be taking relationship advice from someone whose proper breakup is shooting her fiancé with a spirit weapon?"

"He knows it wasn't him, it was about the nation. It's children over lovers." She focused on a spot on the wall. "And his survival wasn't meant to be part of the equation."

"Have you talked to him?"

Korra might've become a friend, but she wasn't even ready to talk about Baatar with herself. "I thought we were talking about Asami."

"I mean, it's going well. Not sure what you're looking for." Korra paused. "Do you know if there was a point where you had to change how you went about uniting the Earth Kingdom? I just have this memory of you being this nice, obedient, kind of peppy worker of Su's."

She ignored the backhanded question. "During a clash in one of the smaller neighboring towns around Ba Sing Se. It had been a month or so of success, but every area would have villagers who tried to work against me because they feared the bandits more than they trusted me to help. I'd get called awful names, attacked, everything, but I tried to keep it as humane as possible, never doing more than blocking their attacks and hoping our actions would speak loud enough to get through to them. But, not this one town. Its people had been starving, children piled into a single makeshift hospital dropping from a sickness that's had a cure for years. The bandits had moved into town, and it was so clear who they were; they'd sit around on deserted streets gambling and drinking, taking their bursts of violence out on anyone who was unlucky enough to pass by. The first thing we did was promise our protection and supplies for as long as they needed them. People had come out, and I could tell that they wanted to be helped, but were too scared of the bandits.

"At the time, I had sustained my second major injury since beginning the campaign, and my left arm was in a sling, so I put my uniform on over it, stuffed the sleeve and put a glove on with it. It went well at first: I've mastered metalbending enough to where I'm fine working with one arm and earthbending at my feet. But, there was this one band of bandits that refused to back down. I tried the nice way one last time with this particularly burly man who had taken up leadership. We seemed to be getting somewhere, but he attacked me out of the blue, ripping my jacket open as I was shot down. The sling became visible, and he started laughing, saying it's clear that I couldn't handle what I'd done before and that he would never relinquish his power to a little girl. That he'd rather the people starve and die than let me win. He tried attacking again, and something just…changed. All the emotion I'd been holding onto, that had kept everything so clean, just slipped off.

"I pulled off a few layers of sheet metal off my uniform, wrapped it around his neck, and raised him off the ground to choke. I told him to remember to remember the hurt little girl as he died. He begged for mercy, tried every trick in the book. My second-in-command told me to let him go, but as I considered it, he told me that all I was doing was distracting myself as his group attacked and that I was just as weak as he thought. I snapped, crushed his windpipe, and set the bloody metal back onto my uniform."

She paused, studying Korra. The Avatar didn't reveal any judgement either way, simply engrossed in the story. The exercising had stopped.

"After that, I thought in a bigger picture, and less about the individual lives of the bandits as they fell or scattered. My reputation preceded me, and eventually, everything they said about the Great Uniter became true, the good and bad." Kuvira paused. "I just never expected the bad to end up so bad."

There were another few moments of silence. "So you killed a guy, what, three times your size, with a broken arm? Who taught you to do that? All those coercing moves with metalbending?"

She paused. "I learned them myself. Su's guard didn't encourage violence."

Korra nodded. "I wouldn't blame you for killing that guy. Especially if the tension had been mounting for a while."

"Don't humor me if you have to lie."

"I'm not lying."

"Korra, stop. I know how this works. I should've never lost my cool and killed that man. If I hadn't done that, maybe I could've done good by your absence and fixed the Earth Kingdom, stepped down and accepted that metal…"

Korra shook her head. "I talked to Bolin about you, and we talked about your decision of not stepping down. The way you worded it made him uncomfortable, but that wasn't what made him decide he couldn't work with you, and I see why. Prince Wu wouldn't have made anything better. You did what you thought was right for the people, and part of me thinks that I would've done the same thing in your position."

Kuvira hadn't thought about Bolin in a long time. He had been so eager to help the victims of the Earth Queen's assassination, always a hard worker with a smile on his face. He had been so genuine; it had reminded her of herself when she was younger. It had hurt when he left the cause, and if she hadn't been so callous and closed off, it would've thrown her off, at least for a second. She truly had loved seeing Opal with a guy like Bolin, and early on, it got her thinking about what it would've been like being a part of the Beifong family without the rift she and Baatar caused.

It was incredible to think what her life could've been if Su had just—if Zaheer had never killed the Earth Queen. Would she still be in Zaofu, guard and dancer, together with Baatar? Would she have finally become an official member of the Beifong family?

Or would it have been like the rest of her life: high hopes, and huge disappointments? Knowing what she did now, did she even really want Su Beifong as a mother-in-law? Or was she just that desperate for love?

She looked back up at Korra. "Is Zaheer still in prison?"

"Yes. Combination escaping prison, assassinating the Earth Queen, throwing the Earth Kingdom into chaos, and maiming me gets one a life sentence."

Lin told her that her sentence was thirty years. Assuming he'd live into his eighties or nineties, Kuvira would manage twenty more years of freedom than the monster who had killed the Earth Queen and plunged her nation into chaos.

"Were you ever really paying attention when I first came to Zaofu?" Korra asked as they switched exercise again.

She thought back to that week; there had been enough out of the ordinary markers to remember it. They were a few days from a dance recital, so she had been hyper focused on that. It was another routine that Huan wanted to learn, so she had been teaching him some of the moves before Korra arrived.

"I remember being excited to meet you and Lin, but it was also common courtesy for the guard to not bother you guys." Kuvira paused. "I remember seeing you watch the rehearsal."

Korra's eyes widened. "You were in that?"

"Yeah."

"Are you a professional dancer?"

"Of sorts."

Korra smiled. "No wonder you fought with such grace. Dance influence?"

Was it odd that Korra kept giving her so many compliments? "I suppose. My metal bending style is more based upon keeping distance and precision. If there's some grace in there, it's unconscious."

"Do you still dance?"

"I haven't in a while. This conditioning will help me, though."

By the time Korra had to leave, Kuvira had a pleasant soreness in her muscles, and was looking forward to having an early night reading in bed. Still coming off the first seventy-two hours in which the lights were always on, Kuvira learned to rely on the guards for time. They'd started giving her a newspaper with breakfast, and dimmed the lights as the graveyard shirt guards came in.

As Korra left, dinner came through the slit. She read while she ate, and took a hot (relatively speaking) shower afterwards. She still couldn't keep herself from glancing at the mirror in her bathroom knowing there was someone stationed there to keep an eye on her, but it wasn't as bad as the early days when she couldn't take a shower without covering her breasts and pubic area. She imagined there would come a day when she'd be able to look right at that mirror and wink, but today, this week, this month, this decade was not that time.

She dried off, slipped on her clean set of clothes, and jumped into bed, returning to the book she'd been working on. Her mind wandered off not long after.

She thought about that day she killed the bandit. For someone who prided herself on how in control she eventually became, she could remember nothing more than feeling out of control during the catalyzing event. It seemed so random, really, that she had killed that particular bandit. Was it possible that Kuvira had just snapped, and everything else happened as it did?

You're weak. She had been called too young, too kind, too trusting so much in those first few months. Fact was, she had been naive, even if she did still have the vision. But that bandit, he had awakened something else in her.

You're weak. It wasn't like she didn't know. In the hours lying awake crying tears of shock and regret at what she had done, she knew why she had snapped.

It was the first insult her father had told her as a child. She was a weak earth bender, that she'd never live up to Suyin Beifong's vision for a metal city. Kuvira hadn't been a prodigy, and hadn't always wanted to face obstacles as head on as she could as an adult. Even as an adult, though, she preferred distance to close combat. Her father had considered that a sign of weakness. No tough love, just exasperation. Her mother had offered to help her, but even she got frustrated with Kuvira and her bending. You're weak. You're useless. You're a shame to this family. I don't care how old you are; there are kids younger than you who have mastered this. You're hardly worth the space you occupy.

Go buy your dad a new pair of shoes. You can at least do that, can't you?

She'd done just that, bought the best pair of shoes she could find with the money they'd given her. But, when she returned to the house, they were gone, and she was locked out. She waited out there an entire evening and night, but they didn't show up. By the time twenty-four hours had passed, Kuvira headed towards the police station, cold, hungry, and terrified. She ended up bumping into one of Su's guards, who took Kuvira in to Su's compound.

Su had been kind to her, offering her blankets, food, and comforting words as she called around. Baatar had been hanging around his mother at the time, and had sat next to Kuvira, saying nothing, just sipping his own cup of tea. Unknown to Kuvira at the time, Su had found out that night that Kuvira's parents had skipped town, but had only directly offered Kuvira a place to stay until they found her parents.

You're weak. It plagued her nightmares for months, even after Su immersed her into the Beifong household and started giving her proper, encouraging earthbending lessons. Kuvira had soared to prodigy level, a master years before any of the other Beifong children. Even Toph had praised her metal bending skills. (Nothing had hurt more than hearing Toph say she gave metal benders a bad name.) But, her parents' doubt in her had never left. Su's fake out with loving Kuvira only solidified that pain.

So, yes, that had been boiling in her mind that day with the bandit. Perhaps what had been so surprising about it, though, was how violent it had made her. She had never been violent before. It had almost reminded her of her parents.

But, as she recalled, the split second that thought had occurred to her had been vanquished by another, stronger thought.

Baatar had said it. That was some incredible metal bending out there. A terrifying new set of abilities. I didn't know you had it in you.

It had made her realize that her parents had been dead wrong about her. She wasn't weak; she was stronger than them, earthbenders who could hardly bend a piece of metal. She could crush them the same way she'd killed that bandit, with one arm in a sling and lying on the floor. She could still remember turning around to face Baatar, and him embracing her, wiping her tears away.

Every great leader struggles in the beginning. No callous can be formed without a little pain. Soon, it'll be those bandits who are hurting.

She fell asleep playing returning those bloody metal sheets to her uniform over and over again.

A/N: Korra and Kuvira getting a little closer, and a bit of Kuvira's past revealed. What do you think? Do you think her killing the bandit and my little take on Kuvira's childhood/abandonment worked? Pacing good?

Seriously, thank you to everyone who's been giving this story love! You guys rock my world, and it's so fun to keep writing this. :) Hope I'm still keeping you guys happy.