Notes: I need sleepovers full of junk food and jazz music and dumb fun stuff stat between these two.
"Bad day?"
Asami sighed heavily, shoulders sagging like a heavy weight had been placed upon them, and she nodded. Korra mimicked her, pressing all of her weight against the wall and into her left foot.
"Me too."
The older girl covered her face with her hands, rubbing slightly at her skin and stretching her palms across her cheeks and breathing in heavily. She felt her eyeshadow smudge with the drag of her finger pads, lipstick pressing on her palms, but she didn't care.
"I am not sleeping tonight," Asami groaned, and removed her hands to press her fingertips to her temples, massaging them deeply.
Korra let out a tired groan as well, digging her shoulder blades into the wall just to feel the cuts and bruises against her back sharper. The dull pain that lingered against her skin when untouched annoyed her; at least the harsher pain was momentary.
"Sleepover?" Korra suggested.
"Please," Asami said with a half-laugh. She stood from her seat on the couch, stretching her arms before her and cracking her knuckles loudly. "Are those dumplings you hid in the icebox still there?"
Korra nodded and pushed off from the wall, cracking her back and neck. "Yup. You go set up the blankets, I'll get the snacks."
"Deal."
The house was silent. Korra had just returned from a late night meeting with ex-Chief Lin Beifong, and what remained of her police force. Tenzin had quickly gone to bed, but Korra wandered through the house until she found Asami on the couch, wide awake at one in the morning, absentmindedly thumbing through some history books. The children were asleep, the brothers were asleep, and the adults were asleep, but Asami and Korra never slept as soundly as they did.
Nightmares plagued them. They both shared Korra's room, after tugging a second bed into the room on the first night of her friends' stay. After they woke to Asami's articulate arguments with her father that she mumbled and shouted in her sleep, and to Korra's violent thrashing and mangled yells as she fought in her dreams, they both got to know each other quickly. It was a friendship based on mutual fears of men and women with masked faces and horrible power in their hands, and through late night talks in the dark, they found that they had a lot in common. More than either of them would have ever expected.
They both grew up lonely. Asami's mother gone, and Korra sent away from her parents left them isolated with no chance for friendships. They were small girls living in places too large and too mysterious and too empty to feel like home; even if they sometimes found themselves missing it. Asami played the part of girl well, but she missed out on just as many milestones as Korra had: no sleepovers, no birthday parties, no one to relate to. They were both stumbling through their lives as teenaged girls and hoped that they were getting it right, until they met each other, of course. Then they both reveled in each other's strangeness and clung to each other because finally, someone understood.
Korra returned to her room with her arms laden with food, mostly containing meat she had purchased in the city that had to be hidden on the Island. She had also pilfered two bottles of fermented tea, her fingers wrapped around the necks and metal handles from the various take-out boxes chilling her skin. Asami had tossed every blanket, sheet, and pillow to the floor to make a kind of nest, which centered on a black lacquered box full of her beauty supplies and the radio, which she left on a staticky jazz station.
They distributed the snacks, settled in against the pillows, and though bags had collected under their eyes and their bones ached, they were calm. Korra stuffed a cold dumpling into her mouth whole, and Asami did the same before reaching for her box. Rifling through it, she pulled out a bottle of nail polish, silently motioning to Korra to extend her leg. Complying, she placed her foot in front of Asami, and after shaking the bottle, Asami started painting Korra's toenails.
"So," Korra said, swallowing the dumpling. "How was your day?