Korra let her head hit vinyl with an exasperated thump. She closed her eyes, if only to block out the insanity of the last thirty minutes/year. Her hands settled weakly on Asami's shoulders, the heiress clutching her middle and pressing her cheek against her clavicle she suspected she was thinking the same.

She barely listened to the wild deductions being yelled out to no one in particular by Varrick. He was already collecting apparatus to measure the Varrickule activity in the room. Asami stretched her legs and pushed herself tighter against Korra's body, shivering not with panic; it was more like relief, sweet singing reprieve all to the tune of Korra's steady breathing. Once she was content, she murmured, her voice laced with exhaustion.

"Do you think it's possible that we're crazy people in a mental ward just rolling around the floor in a straight jacket and everything that just happened is a weird coping mechanism?"

"I'd rather be here with you than not insane." Korra mused slotting her fingers into Asami's locks and taking comfort in the silk. Korra tried to sit up, wondering why no one, not her mother, father, or supposed best friends had come to check she and her fiancee were okay after having collapsed in front of everyone. Still as she flexed her stomach she felt Asami put her weight on her and push her back down, sge mused that maybe they were letting the heiress have this private moment. "Nope." she mumbled, and snuggled her cheek further into Korra's neck. She laughed and pulled her tight against her, feet planting squarely on the ground and inadvertently parting her legs around her thigh.

Asami didn't want anything to change, but she felt like it make her sound spoiled if she started whining now. Not that Korra could hold it against her, or would disagree at all, even now beneath her there was this aura emanating from her girlfriend. She was afraid.

"Varrick's probably gonna want to study me." she spoke, her voice etched with sorrow that the sweet moment had to end. Asami turned her head so her chin pressed onto Korra's chest. Her calm emerald eyes stared up at her with conviction and swagger, a sly smile pulling her lipstick as she stated plainly.

"And he can, if he can get through me." Korra could see the facade in her defensive glare, she was getting better at telling when Asami was holding off the future, dancing around it like the master strategist that she was. Tracing her knuckles along her jaw, Korra craned her neck and kissed her softly.

The rookie officer opened her eyes and turned her head up, awkwardly to discover that the attention of the rest of the room was drawn to the hole in the ceiling, and the gaps in the vinyl floor beneath it, in which grass had sprouted from nowhere. Already lush and bright with butterfly's flitting in deft and confused looking patterns.

Katara had kneeled beside the mound, running long her fingers through the tufts as her hair fell from it's ties and framed her face.

Korra didn't have to look at the files again to see that she was, and still is, beautiful. Without her Jumper being alive the Paladins no longer took an interest in her, for all intents and purposes by murdering her husband she was now normal, but it was clear that everything that passed over twenty years ago still weighed on her soul.

Korra studied her eyes, while her own blues changed and shifted, with her mood or abilities or even who she was looking at, Katara's were steady deep blue. Stable and calm, something to hold on to as the rest of the world spiralled. She understood then why Aang loved her. Loves her.

"You've seen this before?" Mako asked squatting next to her and studying the older woman's features. For all his awkward glory, occasionally the cop had his moments of brilliant deduction.

"Some rifts show us the past. Or the future." Katara explained, bringing up her palm and letting a butterfly land there. "They leave scars." Her gaze reached Korra's, Asami felt those strong arms clamp tighter around her. "What did you see?"

"I don't really understand it." Korra admitted, her heart thumping thickly beneath the heiress' ear. She could have began with the sequential things, the harbour, and a shipping container. The Jumper who was purged of her abilities and the Familiar who died. It felt more personal than that. Not a memory, more like a witnessing, she had been a phantom, alongside Aang, and it tore through them both, equally as harsh that their best friend had died. "I saw Sokka, and Toph. The night he died." Katara looked down, plucking at the blades finally and circling them into her hand. In that moment she looked young again. As young and lost as Aang had first seen her. But Korra wasn't meant to know that. "I was with him too. Aang."

"He's your past life." Katara asked, but Korra heard the questions hidden in her voice. He still exists? He's still watching? He still loves me? Loss ebbed from her face for a moment, and the young water tribe girl felt like she had, briefly, given something back.

"Did he know then? When he was with you?" Korra asked.

"The man before him was Roku. And before him Kyoshi. It came in dreams." Katara's eyes skated over to Suyin, still leafing through her parents file, jotting down the words that weren't blacked out as if trying to piece together a shredded half burned puzzle. "We didn't have time to get to the bottom of it. No one else we knew seemed to have them either."

Every second looking at Katara reminded her that one day Asami could be without her, someone else would have her soul or presence as a memory, and Asami would have no one to hold.

Jinora sat beside her grandmother, reaching out to the butterfly and letting them dance around her fingers, earning a smile.

Korra looked down, inspecting Asami's pensive expression, eyes closed as she memorised this moment.

"We're gonna be okay." Slowly she slipped from her arms, rewarding every few inches Asami relinquished with soft kisses.

Katara rose and kneeled beside Korra, now sitting with Asami cross legged beside her, looking as though she might have wanted to draw a finger across her brow as if it were something familiar. Korra reached up gingerly, touching her fingertip against Katara's own.

Without thinking her eyes began to glow. She flinched and lost herself, almost as if she were being shoved aside and replaced within their own skin. Korra didn't know what the other's could see, but from their expressions it wasn't anything they had seen before. She let out a long restrained breath, and the voice coupled with it was not her own.

"Aang?"

"Katara?" Korra's hand on the vinyl at her hip clenched and tore the ground up around it. Her breathing doubled and chest fluctuated painfully. Her head throbbed and swam as Aang stared out through her eyes. "Katara I'm sorry."

"Korra!" Asami snapped, snatching her hand away from Katara's and with her other she wiped at the blood that had seeped from her nose. Katara flinched out of her reverie, healing instincts taking over, and reaching for a handkerchief. Asami snatched her hand again before she touched her. "Woah-kay let's not let Korra become possessed by the spirit of your dead husband."

Korra hadn't the mind at that moment to tell her she was being harsh. She leaned forward forehead leaning all her weight on Asami's shoulder. Twisting her fingers into her jacket as her head throbbed.

"M'ears hurt 'Sami." she breathed. The heiress combed her fingers through her hair to reveal the thin trickle there.

"Senna!" She held her neck up and urged her silently to hold her head up on her own, "Senna she's losing consciousness!" She fell limp in her arms. Asami struggled with the want to keep her upright and the possible need to lay her down. "Korra don't,"

"Lay her down. On her side." Katara ordered. Asami's arm went out to stop her from touching her again.

"Don't-" she flushed hotly when she realised Katara was only trying to help.

"Check her pulse." she added calmly, unperturbed by Asami's anger. Laying two fingers below the scar on her jaw Asami tried to feel anything through her fingers that were now numb.

"I can't-I can't tell the difference between hers and my own." It hurt to speak, now that her throat was contracting and tears threatening to spill over. Mako kneeled at Korra's head and traded their fingers. She waited and listened in agony. Eyes darting from the detective's to Korra's to Katara's.

"It's there." Mako smiled a little, "Just weak."

Asami held her face in her hands, dropping kisses on her forehead and cheeks,

"You're such a fucking liar." she seethed to her softly.

Senna was there now, medical kit in hands throwing out bandages and tubes.

"Gloves." Katara ordered. Korra's mother handed them to her without question and with expert hands she inspected Korra, her eyes, her ears, glands and chest.

"How?"

"There's not a M.D. on my file for nothing Miss Sato." Katara smirked wryly, Asami had found her lips smiling back without thinking. "She'll be okay. Her body has just been through a lot. But her abilities are building up in her."

"Did this happen to Aang?"

"This is all her."

With shaking hands Asami grabbed the medical wipes and cleaned the blood. Senna's fingers combed through hers to steady her, a motherly hand touched her hairline as she soothed the heiress out of sobbing.

"She just needs rest," Senna urged, although her voice was just as shaken up as she felt.

"She shouldn't leave." Varrick piped up, his voice uncharacteristically quiet. In fact he had been silent for since Asami asked him to load up the floppy disks. "We need to monitor her-make sure she doesn't freak out and prevent her from sending someone back in time so they can live to death, what an assassination that would be-"

"Okay." Asami interjected. "I'll stay with her until she wakes."

Senna curled her arms around Asami's shoulders, the pair watched as Tonraq, Mako and Bolin jumped and dragged a makeshift bed out of crash mats and blankets. All the while families huddled together, as Asami tended Korra, Tenzin, Katara, Suyin, Opal, Bolin, Mako, Bolin, Jinora and Kai watched from about 10 feet away.

"What now?" Kai asked.

"Should we stay together or split up?" Jinora gripped his arm, wordlessly showing her answer.

"Both." Katara surmised. "Half here, half home, that way if they come for either there are enough jumpers to help escape."

"And then what?" Opal stressed.

"As far as we know they're not after us now." Mako pointed out, "If Varrick can decipher these disks we might even know who to look for."

Asami was barely listening, reeling still from how bizarrely the world had turned in just a few short hours. Exhaustion gripped her, but it wasn't enough to make her sleep. Keeping a hand on Korra's warm chest she absorbed its rise and fall and measured its strength. With her free hand she cupped the side of her throat and attuned her finger tips to her fluttery pulse. Senna had managed to wipe most of the blood away, yet Asami found herself tracing drops of red here and there with her eyes, lingering still on the lipstick she had left on the corner of her fiancee's mouth.

Slowly the other's filtered away, nervous but with simply nothing left to do than live their lives with the knowledge that any second they would be persecuted for it.

Korra's family remained in the facility, while Varrick and Zhu Li studied Korra's vitals, blood and surroundings, comparing them against their own.

Senna and Tonraq had long since fallen asleep, slumped against each other on the couch beside the consoles, when their daughter's eyes fluttered open against heavy lids.

"'Sami?"

"How do you feel?" Korra tested briefly, find her neck weak in its ability to raise her ear from the mat. Her answer came as a disgruntled groan. "Alcohol really doesn't sit well with you does it?"

"..Dare you," she mumbled, stretching and tugging and twisting into Asami's arms, her face into her slender neck, "I'm a Water Tribe Jaeger Master."

"What happened?" Asami's arms curled around her gratefully, without the worry that she might disturb her if she held on like she could evaporate at any moment.

"I don't know. It was like Aang just took over, I guess its what it means to have a past life. In some way through me he can come back."

"But your nose was bleeding, and your ears."

"I don't know what to say. This is new to me too. "

"Not even Aang got this?"

"I'm different from the others, I've been exposed to something bigger than they have and its just taking it out of me to adjust. That's all."

"What if you can't though?"

"It will, it'll balance out. The universe always does."

Asami could have told Korra that the universe was under no obligation to balance out or be fair. It had proved time and time again to the heiress that the universe could be a cruel place, indifferent to evening some cosmic scale. They could even have been locked in a tangent universe, doomed to implode and regress only to let the main timeline exist pain free, or at least with a different set of casualties that neither of them could measure.

By rights Korra had too much power, and perhaps her fair universe would see fit to rip something from her to balance the scales. This train of thought filled Asami with dread.

"I hate seeing you hurt." she mumbled feebly, curling the brunette's hair in her fingers as she searched her face in the dark.

"It's not a picnic for me either sweetheart," Korra cracked her classic half smile before fighting her fatigue and raising her head to bring their mouths together. They took comfort in its lazy thrill, and Asami let it shrink her thinking capacity till it was only Korra. Which made what she said next difficult to process. "Where's your laptop?"

"Uhm," She closed her eyes to concentrate, beyond Korra's hands which had snuck their way into her shirt and was warming her skin at her back, "At the apartment I think."

It was impressive how the half conscious, half injured Korra manoeuvred her way out of Asami's hold. She was gone, for perhaps five seconds, the heiress didn't know whether to be pissed or scared. By six Korra was sat on the edge of the mat, fumbling with the latch of the computer on her lap

"What are you doing?"

"I said I'd watch it with you tonight."

"Korra-"

"Asami. You can't make this all about me. You need taking care of too and I'm not going to ignore this." Before she could protest she fed a hand into ebony locks and pitched down to give her a chaste kiss. "Now tell me how to open this thing."

Korra let her take the computer from her hands and she watched her as it's backlight illuminated her skin. She half expected the engineer to smash it against the hard floor by the way she was looking down at it, brows drawn, lips in a tight unforgiving line. Silently she climbed behind her, propping her chin awkwardly over her taller woman's shoulder, until she kneeled, her thighs either side of her hips as she wrapped her arms beneath her ribs.

They watched the player, paused on the opening frame that Asami had come to know pixel by pixel having stared at it for hours and hours since she'd found it. So used to it, it came as a shock to feel Korra against her back, squeezing her out of her languor and reaching for her fingers on the track pad.

"I'm right here." She didn't press however, expertly slotting her own darker fingers between Asami's pale knuckles. The click didn't seem so difficult then.

Asami was glad then, that she was with someone that had been in the house before it was destroyed. She wouldn't have been able to open her mouth to tell her the room they were seeing was the old library, before it had been incinerated, minutes before. Yasuko was at her desk, writing, sketching, pouring over tomes of history books. The heiress remembered fondly the one beneath her fingers, the feint scrawl she could make out of the lion turtle painted on ancient paper was one of her favourite bedtime reads. She remembered asking her mother if she could paint a mural of the fantastical creatures on her bedroom wall, like Korra's wall full of polar bear dogs and ridiculous penguins with four flippers. Her mother didn't even question it, and had set to work on templates that very night.

"She's as beautiful as I remember her." Korra whispered, "Just like you."

Asami couldn't answer, her mother's attention turned out of shot. She stood, not scared, more annoyed that she had been disturbed at this hour.

"Hiroshi isn't here." She told them, "You'd be better off coming back tomorrow. At a more reasonable hour I might add."

"This won't take a minute." The voice was deep, strong, and it sent a shiver coursing through Asami's spine. Someone in the future was stepping on her grave.

There was a light, blue and ethereal, yet the only indication that it was there was its dim refraction off of Yasuko's skin. She flinched, brows drawn together as she inspected the men in front of her. Because it was now men, between the first and Yasuko appeared a boy, wild hair, hands clasping a a remote, and a wrapped in a thick metallic vest, whirling his head around and trying to understand why he was there.

He screamed doubled over and stumbled seemingly out of a trance. "Wh-us going on? Longshot? Duke?" He whirled and faced the man. "You!"

He dove and grappled stumbling back and falling between them. Yasuko stumbles back, wedged between the fight and the walls of books. She scrambles for something, anything she can use to defend herself, and raises a poker into the air. He leaps again arms around this mans neck he has him in a sleeper hold, and his back to the camera.

The older man twists and manages to utter, "The Paladins have invited you to Lake Laogai." The voice came out rhythmic and hypnotic, the bomber stopped his struggling and levelled his gaze.

"I would be honoured to accept their invitation."

He spins, flinging one man across the room and snaps the poker to the ground with a precise kick of his boot. Yasuko's shirt is in his grasp, and in the other hand he presses the switch.

Flames envelope the world, lighting up the screen. Asami swears she hears a Wait! No! but it's swallowed by the roaring angry flames that ripped her mother from this world.

Now that it was over, Korra wrenched the screen down and smacked it shut.

"I know those words" Asami whispered, almost mindlessly. "I would be honoured to accept their invitation."