It had been all too easy.
Her number is eleven. She was eleven when she asked her father about bloodbending, when Tarrlok lost his temper at her for the first time. She spent eleven months practicing on the rats, then on stray dogs and cats.
It took eleven tries for her to bloodbend her first person without killing them, the common muggers and extortionists. She masqueraded in daylight as a doleful, timid child of privilege. She wondered, wondered if there were ways for her bloodbending to alter a person, to damage them beyond recognition. No, not physically, but ways for them to forget their past, to erase their memories. Eleven experiments to perfect her technique. She learned how to heal only so she'd know the intricacies of the body—so she could destroy it.
She was eleven when her mother, often absent because of her wordly duties, told her the truth about her parentage. Something not even Tarrlok knew. He didn't know how Korra's eyes widened when Amon's mask fell, when the red paint washed off and she saw him. Oh, she saw him.
Their daughter is twenty-two now, and the city buzzes with progress, the seediest parts of the city rallying to appease her. She smirks. When the times comes, not even her mother will be able to stop her. After the nights of tears and shivering, eleven years of them, she's more than her real father, more than the Avatar.
She's always so cold. Can't get warm.
Receding from the world, she makes one final visit before setting her plan into motion. Normally, hardly anybody would be allowed to visit a terrorist leader in his isolated cell. But she is the daughter of the Avatar, and nobody can deny her, not even the spirits themselves.
Their names whispered on her lips, settling there like frost. When she's placed on trial, she smirks and their names flutter away like dainty snowflakes in the wind. Frenzied like a lost seal pup in a storm. They have people who comb the spider-rats' nests from her hair.
She claims self defense. If she hadn't killed her mother, her mother would've severely hurt her.
At the trial, Tarrlok looks into his daughter's (his niece's?) gelid eyes and bows his head. He should've known. He should've known. She was a sick child, and he begged the spirits that she would survive.
They answered accordingly.
They are idiots. The crowd, the Council. He's long retired from his duty, and he knows what his daughter plans to do. Did they learn nothing from Yakone? They had her chi blocked before the trial, but they don't know his family, don't know the power. Don't know who her paternal grandfather is.
But he'll try to stop her. Do what he has to do to end this sad story.
Moving his hands off of the arms of his chair, Tarrlok watches as his daughter tenses. Her eyes are these slimy things, glossy like the shell of two beetles, two fat flea-ticks. She knows just where to look, her gray eyes boring into her father's tense expression. The muscles in his throat tighten.
He's nothing, nothing to her. A weakling.
Gasps sound as he and the defendant collapse and the court's clock chimes. An hour before noon.
For this is what happens when one tempts fate.