A/N: A lot of people have been asking my about my plans for this fic, so here's the deal: I have chapters planned for Senna, Bolin, Asami, and Mako, and after that, I am not sure. I don't have a particular conclusion in mind, so it's conceivable that this could continue in an open-ended fashion until Book 4 premieres or I run out of ideas, whichever comes first. (Obviously, I won't continue to update quite this often. It just so happened that inspiration and free time coincided this week.) If you have an idea for a chapter you'd like to see, come leave me a message on my tumblr (bobbityhobbity). Please don't dump your ideas in reviews here. I'd like to keep them all the prompts I've collected in one place. And please do keep in mind the general tone and feel of these chapters when making your request.
Here's the thing about this chapter: it is rather intense (not graphic, just emotionally intense). Or, at least, it was an intense writing experience. I'll return with something a bit sweeter soon, hopefully. Thanks for reading!
Her days have fallen into a not entirely unpleasant routine. She is used to routines. Routines are familiar: wake up at dawn, run laps around the compound for one hour, breakfast at 8:00 before a full morning of firebending training, then lunch, tutoring, an hour or two with Naga, dinner, bath, and early to bed.
The upheaval of the last year was the exception, and now her hours are once again ruthlessly divided into segments: she wakes early and stares at the wall for a while, trying not to send signals that she is awake because there is almost always someone nearby on alert. At 8:00, Pema brings breakfast with one or four children in tow. Then someone—Pema again or her mother—comes by to help her bathe and get into a fresh robe. Next, Kya arrives for healing and massage and gives her exercises to do until she's in too much pain to continue. Then lunch. In the afternoon, someone usually takes her outside. If it's Bolin, she gets dumplings. If it's Asami, it's news from town. If it's Mako, she gets a blessed hour or two of not having to try and talk. Then there is dinner, and then she is in bed again, completely exhausted from a full day of doing almost nothing but breathing and trying to lift eating utensils from the plate to her face without making a mess.
The routine is refreshingly predictable and stultifyingly dull. But today is different. Today is special. And it is making her anxious.
She stares at the tray in her lap and tries to forget about her hands. She hides them under the covers and closes her eyes, takes three deep breaths and pretends they are someone else's. It's when she thinks about them too much that the shaking is worst.
When it feels safe, she tries to lift them without looking at them, tries to find the chopsticks by touch. She insists on using the chopsticks . Three more deep breaths, and she is finally holding them between her fingers. Her other hand grasps the bowl—don't think about it don't think about it—and she starts to pick up some rice. She is sweating by the time it reaches her mouth, and that's when the chopsticks start to slip. A few grains get into her mouth, but now she has to start over.
She tries to remember what Tenzin keeps telling her: that each small step forward is a victory. It's an unintentionally cruel metaphor, given that she can't actually take steps without assistance, but she knows what he means. Still, it is hard to view sitting upright for 10 or 15 or 30 minutes at a time as a victory, to see feeding herself as movement forward. But she trusts Tenzin, and so she tries.
The rice is almost completely cold by the time Asami enters. She has promised to help Korra get ready for the big day. Smiling, make-up applied with an engineer's precision and an artist's eye, Asami crosses the room and stops just next to the bed. Korra feels a little smaller underneath her gaze and looks down to see the small grains of rice dotting her front.
"Hey," Asami says. "Breakfast going ok?" and she makes a gesture Korra has come to recognize. Her hands dart forward and then kind of flutter in mid-air as she weighs the impulse to grab the chopsticks out of Korra's quivering hands against pretending she just doesn't see it. "Looks like you're … making progress."
"It's fine," Korra says. She tries to bring the rice back up to her mouth when both chopsticks fall from her grip, bounce off the mattress, and clatter on the floor, taking whatever dignity she might have preserved with them. She feels her heart start to race in her chest as frustration seizes her and pain starts to bloom behind her eyes.
Asami quickly gathers the utensils before sitting down on the edge of the bed and gracefully gathering a bite of food to hold toward Korra's mouth. "This will go faster if you let me help." Her eyes are kind, but there is something else there too, a look of pleading. Asami hates to see Korra struggle, and Korra feels obliged to protect her from it.
Sliding her hands back under the covers so that she can no longer see them, Korra ponders saying no. She wants to tell Asami that she can to do this herself. But she knows the very look of her is an argument against it. With fists clenched, she calculates the costs of further resistance. The shaking isn't so bad, but the tingling is getting especially pronounced, pinpricks that begin at the tips of her fingers and toes and work their way up her limbs if she doesn't calm down. "No, I could use the help."
But as she gives into Asami, she takes the time to breathe, to imagine the point of light at the center of her consciousness, to try to empty her mind of angry and fearful thoughts and to keep the pain and weakness from gaining further territory.
"That's better," Asami says, her painted lips curving upward. Korra does her best to go completely blank. She will need to in order to survive the rest of the day.
It will be the first meal in a dozen that she doesn't feed herself. Some days all the steps are backwards.
…
It's hard to be inconspicuous when you are the Avatar and you are in a wheelchair. Korra knows they can't help themselves, that people are just going to look at her, but she also can't help her resentment. In the corner where Asami has placed her, she looks down at her lap and tries to avoid the eyes by focusing on the individual blue threads in the fabric of her skirt.
Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty…
She keeps losing count and starting over. Someone stoops down slightly, and she looks up to see Lord Zuko's scarred and wizened face. "That was tremendously moving," he says, his eyes soft. "I was crying myself."
A flash of heat erupts across her neck and face. She wasn't aware that anyone had noticed. You were crying because you were happy for Jinora, she insists to herself. It was that and nothing more.
"Aang would have been so proud to see what you accomplished today." She tries to look grateful, but this is the sort of shit people have been saying to her for two weeks straight, and it has ceased to have any meaning for her.
"Your legacy as the Avatar is going to be tremendous." The words stick to her skin and seep through her pores, and it hurts because legacies are for people who are eighty, not eighteen. She manages a faint word of thanks and feels him leave as she goes back to counting threads.
But thoughts keep intruding without her permission. How would Tenzin's speech have been any different if you had actually died … seventeen, no, nineteen, no…shit.
With her eyes screwed shut, she tries to imagine the point of light at her center, imagines that light pulsing slowly in time with the rhythm of her heart. She opens her eyes to see Jinora across the room, her newly tattooed head the only thing in the room more noticeable than a broken Avatar.
Be happy for Jinora, she reminds herself.
But the feeling she had at the ceremony is starting to return, the feeling that something malevolent is sitting just over her right shoulder, a thing made more fearsome because she can't quite look at it.
One, two, three, four, five … don't cry, you are going to embarrass yourself.
No sooner does she think it than the back of her throat starts to become tight and pressure builds behind her temples. She looks around very quickly for a way to escape before remembering that she would have no way to get there even if she could see it.
Asami, come back already.
She tries to count again, but the edges of her vision start to blur. It isn't tears though. It's more like the distortions she sees before a really awful headache.
Not now. Not now not now not now not now.
Her eye catches a clock, and she realizes that it has been, at most, five minutes since Asami left her to get food. But that five minutes has stretched into eons. It has become her entire existence. She looks toward Tenzin and Jinora and sees a future unfolding before her in which the airbenders roam the Earth and she remains trapped in this chair, a living corpse for people to smile at while dispensing pleasantries, respected for past heroisms but entirely useless in the present.
It is then that she realizes she can't feel her hands. The stinging and prickling that has accompanied her every waking minute for the past two weeks is absent, but so too is everything else. She looks down to where they lie limply in her lap. There is nothing. No warmth from her legs. No sense of the fabric's texture. They are inert.
No no no no no no no…
She wills them to move, to tremble, to wave around wildly, whatever, but it's like the connection between them and her brain has been cut off. It's like they are no longer hers.
"Korra?"
She looks up to see Asami, two plates of refreshments in her hands. And the alarm that spreads over the other woman's face sets Korra's pulse to thundering. She can tell. It must be really bad.
"Korra." She looks on the edge of panic herself. "Korra, what's wrong?"
"Asami…" is all she can choke out. "I need to… I need to…" For a second she thinks Asami will believe that she just needs to go to the bathroom, that her vision isn't starting to tunnel and her breathing isn't starting to get labored. But Korra's confidence fails when she sees her motion someone over.
"Mako, come here." And Mako appears with three drinks in his hands, which he sets on the floor before kneeling next to the chair. She is glad for once that his face is so much less emotive than Asami's.
"What is it?" he asks.
I'm dying. I know what dying feels like, and I'm definitely dying.
"I don't know," says Asami. "Should we get her parents? Tenzin?"
"No," Korra finally manages to gasp out, terror seizing her at the thought it. She doesn't want them to watch this happen to her. "Just take me some place else."
Asami is still practically standing on one foot, her body angled like she might bolt for help at any second. But finally she grabs the wheelchair handles and whips Korra around, making for the nearest door with Mako in tow.
"I still think we should tell somebody," Asami blurts as they escape to the family sitting room. She is trying to be quiet, but her voice is nearly a whistle in Korra's ears.
"Give it a second," Mako says.
Spots are forming in Korra's vision, and she is struggling at this point for each painful breath. A blob that resembles Mako comes into view. "Korra, tell me what's going on," he insists.
"I can't… I can't…"
"Korra." His voice is almost angry. She wants that. She wants him to be angry at her, angry for her. She wants everyone to quit being so damn nice.
"I can't feel anything," she finally gasps out, her voice barely above a whisper. "I think I'm paralyzed."
She looks down at her hands and sees Mako grab them in his and squeeze hard.
"Can you feel that?" he asks.
She shakes her head. She doesn't. "Get me out of this chair." Suddenly nothing seems more urgent than not being in the chair.
In an instant, she is airborne as Mako scoops her up and lays her out on the sofa. "Go get Kya," he says to Asami.
Asami looks at Korra and hesitates. "Is that ok?" she asks.
Korra nods, wondering why she hadn't thought of it. "Thank you."
"Korra, listen to me," says Mako. "You aren't paralyzed, ok? Look. You grabbed onto me just now."
She looks and sees that her fist is still clutching a handful of Mako's jacket. Suddenly the tingling returns, then a sharp pain running through her fingers and up her arm and through her chest. And she is torn between relief and further panic.
"Am I going crazy then?"
"No," he says.
"I can't breathe." She feels like she gets less air with every gasp. It will only be seconds—she's sure—before she can't draw breath at all.
"I know," he says. "Listen, I'm going to help you sit up, ok?"
"I can't."
"You can." His eyes are stern, and he sounds like her surly pro-bending captain all over again.
He pulls her into a seated position and sits behind her on the sofa, holding her body up with his. "Breathe with me, ok?"
She feels the movement of his chest behind her and tries to match the rhythm.
"Korra." The voice she hears is Kya's, and she turns to see the waterbender coming toward her, a water skin slung over one arm. Asami is still barely holding it together, but there is no panic in Kya's face.
"I'm not paralyzed, but I think I might still be dying," Korra says as Kya kneels in front of her, gathering water into her hands. Her own voice sounds like a child's.
Kya glances over her shoulder at Mako, get some essential piece of information from his eyes, and slowly moves her hands up Korra's arms to her chest. The water is as cool and soothing as Kya's presence, and almost immediately, Korra feels like she is actually taking in air again.
"You definitely aren't dying," says Kya. "Asami, come over here and help Korra raise her arms over her head."
Asami's posture relaxes, and she looks grateful for something to do. Korra feels the gentle pressure of the other girl's hands against her own, and then her arms feel like they are floating, floating up above her head, and the pressure in her chest starts to lift. Her ribs expand with ease again, and Korra feels like she could instantly fall into peaceful sleep as Asami lowers her arms back down and Mako maintains his firm hold around her waist and the bitter taste of adrenaline leaves her mouth.
"Better?" says Kya.
Korra nods, ready to weep with relief.
"Try to do it yourself now."
She lifts her own arms, and though they are heavy and sore, they feel like they are part of her body once again. Closing her eyes, she does an inventory: toes, calves, thighs, stomach, arms. All intact, all still part of her, and all still aching.
"I'm tired," she says. She feels a tear escape out of the corner of one eye. "Don't tell anyone, ok?"
Mako squeezes her body from behind, and Asami and Kya each take one of her hands.
"We won't," says Asami. "But you tell one of us if you feel something like that happening again. We know what to do now, ok?"
Korra nods—hoping against hope that it never does—and allows Mako to carry her all the way back to her room. Asami brings the chair, but no one asks Korra to sit in it.
Like they are performing their daily rites, the two women wash and dress Korra for bed while Mako sets himself up for the first watch of the night. Kya gives her something that sends a blissful kind of heaviness descending over her entire body, weighing her down with the promise of a deep sleep. And she gives in.
Some days all the steps are backwards. But today is today. And tomorrow is tomorrow.