Count the bodies like sheep
Oct. 8th, 2014 10:06 pmWHO: Korra & Hei
WHAT: Months after Korra disappears, Hei receives news on her whereabouts.
[ When the word first reaches him that Korra -- missing for months -- has been spotted near the dingy steel-factories in the Earth Kingdom, Hei doesn't credit it. He's hauled in a fishing trawl's worth of Red Lotus members who've supplied him with similar non-leads. It's always a toss-up about what they know; give the order to hook up the alligator clips and crank the generator and they spew so much bullshit that even if there's real intel mixed in with it, you can never be sure, much less make use of it. ]
[ When further word comes confirming the first word -- he's sent tails on the scene -- a heat-flicker he'd like to call joy but that is really shock courses through him, from his toes in the steel-enforced boots to the very ends of his long hair. ]
[ Korra hasn't been abducted. Korra is still alive. ]
[ After the debacle at the South Pole, where the Red Lotus had attacked Tonraq, and where his daughter wasn't even considered an eligible candidate for leading the tribe, Hei had let her return to Republic City -- ostensibly to focus on her Avatar duties. In truth, he'd thought she'd prefer space to lick her wounds, while he hung back to focus the entirety of his energies on weeding out and eliminating the Red Lotus. They'd exchanged letters, terse and to-the-point -- he out of natural reticence and security reasons, she due to time-constraints and a lack of anything new to report. But halfway through, the correspondence ceased. In the dizzying vacuum of silence that followed, Hei learnt, from Tenzin, that Korra wasn't in Republic City. Had, in fact, never arrived there at all. ]
[ Looking back on it, Hei wonders: why hadn't he guessed it sooner? Would a smarter man have come to his senses faster? He'd been so caught up in eradicating the Red Lotus. In safeguarding Korra. But, as usual, he'd lost the forest for the fucking trees. It's so obvious now, so terrifyingly self-evident, that Korra was drifting away from everyone -- her family, her friends. He'd known she had, in clinical terms, posttraumatic stress disorder. He recognized enough of the signs. With it came that morose detachment in her that none of his efforts could regulate. She'd just floated further and further off. Small as star-dust and infinitely heavier.]
[ Maybe it is me, Hei thinks bitterly. Maybe I drive them off. ]
[ But that's useless self-indulgence, and fails to solve the problem at hand. Which consists of the latest bulletin. The Avatar is fighting in illegal underground brawls. ]
[ Collecting his essential gear, Hei abandons the South Pole -- recently his base of operations -- and heads to the Earth Kingdom. He hasn't informed anyone in his network where he's going, beyond a few key players. He doesn't need to. Over the past few months, he's amassed assets who hail from either careers in need-to-know environments, or those who've spent their lives in the dust, right at the fringes of society. They've joined him for profit and plunder and he gives them plenty -- a kind of privatized intelligence operation, more shadowy, better connected, and substantially less accountable than official security firms in Korra's world. ]
[ A miniature Syndicate, Mao calls it snidely -- though Hei prefers not to think of it in those terms. ]
[ He needs to scour through deep waters for the control and intel necessary to stay afloat. The organization doesn't represent a life-vest, but a safety net. An expansive tool to cover greater ground, and secure a heftier bulk of weaponry, manpower and resource. Because no-one fights harder or moves faster than mercenaries when they smell a pay-off. ]
[ At the specified location, not far from the waterfront, Hei drifts in -- a hooded sweatshirt, heavy workboots, clean-shaven but with his hair in the haphazard tie he's taken to favoring after he'd stopped cutting it. The air is bilgy with damp; the pitted streets are pretty much deserted. The few guys he passes aren't dangerous so much as desperate, broken by pills or inhalants or strong drink or the unstoppable craving for all those things. Some pale faces jump out of dark alleys asking him for something, or offering it, but most give him wide berth. A cold glint in Hei's gaze, lurking past the mildness, discourages confrontation. ]
[ Korra. Are you really out here? ]
WHAT: Months after Korra disappears, Hei receives news on her whereabouts.
[ When the word first reaches him that Korra -- missing for months -- has been spotted near the dingy steel-factories in the Earth Kingdom, Hei doesn't credit it. He's hauled in a fishing trawl's worth of Red Lotus members who've supplied him with similar non-leads. It's always a toss-up about what they know; give the order to hook up the alligator clips and crank the generator and they spew so much bullshit that even if there's real intel mixed in with it, you can never be sure, much less make use of it. ]
[ When further word comes confirming the first word -- he's sent tails on the scene -- a heat-flicker he'd like to call joy but that is really shock courses through him, from his toes in the steel-enforced boots to the very ends of his long hair. ]
[ Korra hasn't been abducted. Korra is still alive. ]
[ After the debacle at the South Pole, where the Red Lotus had attacked Tonraq, and where his daughter wasn't even considered an eligible candidate for leading the tribe, Hei had let her return to Republic City -- ostensibly to focus on her Avatar duties. In truth, he'd thought she'd prefer space to lick her wounds, while he hung back to focus the entirety of his energies on weeding out and eliminating the Red Lotus. They'd exchanged letters, terse and to-the-point -- he out of natural reticence and security reasons, she due to time-constraints and a lack of anything new to report. But halfway through, the correspondence ceased. In the dizzying vacuum of silence that followed, Hei learnt, from Tenzin, that Korra wasn't in Republic City. Had, in fact, never arrived there at all. ]
[ Looking back on it, Hei wonders: why hadn't he guessed it sooner? Would a smarter man have come to his senses faster? He'd been so caught up in eradicating the Red Lotus. In safeguarding Korra. But, as usual, he'd lost the forest for the fucking trees. It's so obvious now, so terrifyingly self-evident, that Korra was drifting away from everyone -- her family, her friends. He'd known she had, in clinical terms, posttraumatic stress disorder. He recognized enough of the signs. With it came that morose detachment in her that none of his efforts could regulate. She'd just floated further and further off. Small as star-dust and infinitely heavier.]
[ Maybe it is me, Hei thinks bitterly. Maybe I drive them off. ]
[ But that's useless self-indulgence, and fails to solve the problem at hand. Which consists of the latest bulletin. The Avatar is fighting in illegal underground brawls. ]
[ Collecting his essential gear, Hei abandons the South Pole -- recently his base of operations -- and heads to the Earth Kingdom. He hasn't informed anyone in his network where he's going, beyond a few key players. He doesn't need to. Over the past few months, he's amassed assets who hail from either careers in need-to-know environments, or those who've spent their lives in the dust, right at the fringes of society. They've joined him for profit and plunder and he gives them plenty -- a kind of privatized intelligence operation, more shadowy, better connected, and substantially less accountable than official security firms in Korra's world. ]
[ A miniature Syndicate, Mao calls it snidely -- though Hei prefers not to think of it in those terms. ]
[ He needs to scour through deep waters for the control and intel necessary to stay afloat. The organization doesn't represent a life-vest, but a safety net. An expansive tool to cover greater ground, and secure a heftier bulk of weaponry, manpower and resource. Because no-one fights harder or moves faster than mercenaries when they smell a pay-off. ]
[ At the specified location, not far from the waterfront, Hei drifts in -- a hooded sweatshirt, heavy workboots, clean-shaven but with his hair in the haphazard tie he's taken to favoring after he'd stopped cutting it. The air is bilgy with damp; the pitted streets are pretty much deserted. The few guys he passes aren't dangerous so much as desperate, broken by pills or inhalants or strong drink or the unstoppable craving for all those things. Some pale faces jump out of dark alleys asking him for something, or offering it, but most give him wide berth. A cold glint in Hei's gaze, lurking past the mildness, discourages confrontation. ]
[ Korra. Are you really out here? ]
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Date: 2014-10-11 11:41 pm (UTC)Instead he pulls back to take off his pants, and Korra moves to do the same. She already has her pants a third of a way down her legs when he yanks them from her. She pulls her knees up abruptly, using his iron grip on her ankles to pull him closer. He doesn't get to toy with her, not tonight, not without a fight.]
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Date: 2014-10-12 12:04 am (UTC)[ He meets her gaze then, letting the look rise from beneath his lashes, the unruly dark spill of his hair knifing across their bluish glint. Dips his head to kiss her, so tender that he immediately half regrets the impulse and its fulfillment. His earlier kisses were less deliberate, more savage. A kind of feeding. This is too much, too much intimacy after months of nothing. And yet if he gives into his opposing desires he will do no better, will likely do more harm. Brutality is easy, but the pleasure is too fast and facile, and the aftermath will yield no satisfaction. He needs something more, some essential truth that will be enough to reach through Korra's fogging aura of sadness. ]
[ Except he can't think of a single fucking thing. There's only this. Soft kisses that unravel into something hot and biting and wet, as if he wants to steal her air and white out her mind, needs this imperfect thing between them to be enough to drag her back to where he is. ]
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Date: 2014-10-12 12:46 am (UTC)Don’t do that!
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Date: 2014-10-12 01:04 am (UTC)[ The words are wavering on a drawn breath. He absorbs Korra's tension, puts up the hand she'd knocked off her throat to cradle her face, thumb rubbing across the jut of cheekbone. It's back again, that wild flicker in her gaze, cutting across the smoky warmth of lust to meet his with a renewed panic. It is like treading through a minefield: navigating around this war-torn, damaged new Korra with her hair-trigger volatility, her explosions of panic or violence at the slightest wrong move. ]
[ All the psychic thumbprints of trauma, he knows. She's not that innocent teenager anymore -- sweet as toffee and bright as sunshine -- and the acknowledgement destroys something inside Hei. This was never the life he'd envisioned for her. ]
[ The air between them is still thick with humidity and aborted want. He breathes heavily, but his tone is almost soothing. ]
I won't hurt you.
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Date: 2014-10-12 01:22 am (UTC)She's perilously close to crying and she hates it. She takes a deep, struggling breath — tries to say something in response, but she can't speak around the lump in her throat — so instead she just yanks his head back down for a kiss. Demanding, scolding, and apologetic all at once.]
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Date: 2014-10-12 01:46 am (UTC)[ It shouldn't be that way. She'd once been so shining and sweet, so fucking naive and trusting, and Hei had derided that purity even as he'd pedestalized it. Because she was everything he'd never had the chance to be; because he'd wanted much more for her than everything he'd been dished out. He isn't sure what. But at least something better than this. Better than the sharks of trauma swimming in her blue, blue eyes, the heavy anchors of misery weighing down the sides of her mouth. ]
[ He keeps the kiss going until her heartrate isn't spiking. Listening as if with his whole body, through the fevery saw of their breathing, as if for tiny explosions of stress and adrenaline across the scorched earth of her body. ]
[ When he speaks, it's barely a buzz against her lips. ]
Remember ... it won't kill you.
[ The panic attacks, he means. ]
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Date: 2014-10-12 02:45 am (UTC)I missed you.
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Date: 2014-10-12 03:08 am (UTC)[ It's easy to feel isolated, out-of-sorts, when your own life is on standby. ]
[ Exhaling, he lets his forehead roll against hers, warm and lazy. A habitual intimacy of theirs that he hasn't even realized he's missed. Slipping an arm under her body, he gathers her closer, his rough palm cradling the back of her head, where the base of her skull meets the top of her neck. The hair at the nape is uneven, as if chopped off with a blade. He explores it carefully with his fingertips, caught in a blind mix of sadness and marvel. Some of it sticks up in kittenish tufts, and rasps daringly against his fingers; some of it is still much too long by far. ]
[ It's ruined, he thinks dimly. Yet the thought is accompanied by an aching swell of joy. Because despite the changes -- interior and exterior -- it's still Korra. Lost goods. Damaged goods. Stolen goods. But mostly still good. (Better than he ever will be, by far.) ]
[ At her words, he tightens his arms around her, rubbing slow whorls with his palms. Kisses her ear, and breathes, ]
Don't leave me again.
[ An order, a threat, but most of all a plea. ]
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Date: 2014-10-12 04:10 am (UTC)Same goes for you. [Don't ever leave her behind like she's a princess in a castle.]
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Date: 2014-10-12 04:36 am (UTC)[ He's conducted his affair with Korra the same way: as if the ground is swooping up to meet both their careening bodies. It's exactly why the pace and fury of what he feels for her hasn't died down. Because he knows what it's like to exist on the opposite end of the spectrum -- a cold and solitary existence with no peace or hope anywhere, aware that everything he values has been torn apart and destroyed. ]
[ He couldn't afford a repeat of that. Doesn't know how or why he'd endure it. Which was why he'd been so relentlessly hellbent on eliminating the Red Lotus. It was a purpose equal to his particular abilities, to the sharp focus of his limited ability to protect, which, while not wide, goes so very deep. ]
[ But it's not worth it if this is the cost. Korra's aimlessness. Her intense unhappiness. ]
[ Gently, he tips a kiss to her forehead. His tone conveys a sardonic amusement that's at odds with his darkly-bruised gaze. ]
I should handcuff us together.
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Date: 2014-10-12 07:48 pm (UTC)Anyway, enough talking. [She reaches down and wraps her hand around his erection. A harsh, violent grip — the hand on her neck may have taken her out of the moment, but it hasn't lessened her desire for rough play.]
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Date: 2014-10-12 08:43 pm (UTC)[ His breathing hitches, very faintly, as if something in his chest has tripped up but caught itself before stumbling. In contrast to Korra's rough grip, his is almost gentle as he handles the nape of her neck, runs his thumb up a line of tendon behind one ear, before tipping her head up to kiss her. It's heated and wet, deliberately sloppy, as if clouded in a haze of want. Yet there's a precision too, in the way his free hand skims across her body. Palming her breasts, letting the soft springy points of nipples rasp across his callouses. Stroking the warm drum of her belly, the curves of hips and ass, fingertips pushing into warm dimples of flesh, before he dips his palm low between her thighs. ]
[ He lets his fingers comb through the humid tangle of pubic hair, tracing the damp seam of her, without pushing inside. Instead he lets them rest there, a possessive imperative that matches the way his lips play with hers. Letting her do what she likes, even as he sets to reacquainting himself with lost territory, determined after months of deprivation to take his time. ]
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Date: 2014-10-12 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-12 09:58 pm (UTC)[ He breaks the kiss on a sharp inhale, just as two fingers slide between her pubic lips -- so hot and slick -- teasing her in circles before curling into her, instantly wet, crooking and stroking as the web of his thumb presses against her clit. At the same time he nuzzles the crook of her neck, the undersides of her breasts, taking a couple of idle licks, before shifting his head so he can draw as much of one breast as he can into his mouth, sucking hard, rolling the pebbly texture of her areola against his teeth and tongue. ]
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Date: 2014-10-12 10:19 pm (UTC)She uses her own hand on his dick to show how she wants to be touched — brutal, aggressive, just short of painful. Punishing.]
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Date: 2014-10-12 10:56 pm (UTC)[ He tries not to think about it. 'Lovers' is a sweet and hilariously inappropriate word for what they'd once actually been, for their numbered handful of secret fuckings -- crude, tragic, banal, messy. But what they'd had had been enough to forge a bond -- fragile and wavering as a current, but containing in its intense brightness the best of himself, as well as the worst. ]
[ She moans, and the sound is so gorgeously desperate. It sends Hei's mind spiraling, waking something that is both ravenous and envious behind the bars of his ribs. Altered and abraded in so much else, this is one thing about Korra that remains intact. The depths of emotion available to her, the luxury of experiencing everything -- pleasure, pain, grief, joy -- so honestly and intensely. It always seems just out of Hei's reach, though he'll admit it's almost palpable when he's with her. ]
[ Squeezing her clit with the pad of his thumb, he works his fingers deep, like the twist of a key in a lock, punctuating it with the scrape of his teeth across her warm soft breast. He lets it pop free with a slurp, the noise dirtysweet, an echo of his busy fingers and the seeping heat between her thighs. He focuses on the other breast -- biting at it, printing dark flesh with darker crescents, feeding on the nipple with a shameless gulping cruelty. Meanwhile his hips jerk, his cock a jutting throb in her palm, slick and dark and painfully hard. ]
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Date: 2014-10-12 11:37 pm (UTC)She gasps and whimpers. Another thing she's missed — she could never mouth herself like that. She hooks her leg around his: to pull him closer, to hug him as best she can, to release some of the tension building up inside. He's not quite lubed enough for how hard & fast she's stroking him, but she's only going to go harder unless he complains.]
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Date: 2014-10-13 12:03 am (UTC)[ With a raw noise low in his throat, he abandons her breasts. Snatches up her hand with his free one, then brings it to his mouth. Gnawing at the heel of her palm, licking up its surface to suck three of her fingers into his mouth. He laves at them, hot and slippery and messy, tonguing the whorls of fingerprints and those faint fighter's calluses, before he guides her hand back to his cock. Shows her how to strip him -- fast, brutal, giving her the freedom to be as rough as she likes. Meanwhile his other hand stays wedged between her legs. Hot digits jab with a cruel tenderness inside her, rubbing at her sweet-spot. Slickness between his fingers, in the sodden tangle of curls; the scent of her, sharp and heady, wafting up and making his mouth water. ]
[ He doesn't know what he wants more. To fuck her, to taste her, to feel her hot little mouth on his cock. It all makes blazing-red fingers span across his brain, squeezing it tight around a single mantra -- I want I want I want. ]
[ In the end, he settles for kissing her again. Wet biting gulps, over and over -- a hot triangle from mouth to both breasts and back again. Keeping at it until her lips are as bruised as swollen as her nipples, the flavors disquietingly identical on the tip of his tongue. ]
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Date: 2014-10-13 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-13 01:28 am (UTC)[ Right now, though, that curse is the farthest thing from his mind. She guides his erection against her sopping entrance. The head nestles against the wet curls with a liquid kiss; he can practically feel the red-hot energy humming off her. So wet, he could slip in without any effort at all. ]
[ Shit. ]
[ Hei's thoughts splay in different directions, spooling and stretching, snapping like spiderwebs. He wants badly to wrench away. There's a condom in the pocket of his fallen trousers -- old, generic, but still usable. He is of the times of his homeworld, a product of his profession; meticulous and careful by nature. Knocking Korra up again isn't high on his list of priorities anyway. Especially after he'd nearly lost her the first time. ]
[ Except he can feel the hot burls of impatience gathering in his muscles. His hips twitch, thighs ticcing. When he sinks into her, it's with a slippery, splitting, unexpected force -- not by degrees but with one snapping thrust, the full length of his cock filling her, sealing his pelvic bone against the wet thatch of her curls, a relentless pressure against her clit. ]
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Date: 2014-10-13 01:51 am (UTC)Fuck me hard. [She doesn't want to walk straight for at least a week.]
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Date: 2014-10-13 02:19 am (UTC)[ Except he can't think. Not now -- not anymore. She knots herself around him, a pretty flushed bow, and he settles gratefully, their damp bellies pressed together, his weight on his elbows. Cupping her ass with one palm, and her head with the other, fingers threaded tight into her hair. When he sets up a rhythm, there's nothing measured or controlled about it. Nothing like the way BK201 fights or lies or schemes. He drives into her hard -- the kind of brutal pounding that makes the cheap springs in the mattress whine, the headboard judder. Over and over, as if he wants to wreck her, inside, outside. Wants to crawl up into her and just be. His ragged breathing interrupts the gloom, and the way he kisses her is drunken and clumsy, sucking at her lips, her tongue, swallowing the hundred unspoken words that seem to hang in the tiny spaces between them. ]
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Date: 2014-10-13 02:58 am (UTC)She doesn't look jealously at young mothers. She doesn't dream of babies. She's just comfortable with the possibility.
But even if she wasn't, this feels too good to waste energy on fear. She kisses him like she wants to eat him alive, pants and whimpers with every thrust. She can feel tears gathering at the edges of her eyes, a physiological reaction to the tension not just building up as he pounds her, but the tension that's been building for the past seven months. Maybe even the last three years.]
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Date: 2014-10-13 03:23 am (UTC)[ Part of him knows he'd have valued the baby for itself, whatever it was, and through it maybe he would've been able to accept some part of him that was lost forever. ]
[ Except Korra had nearly died the first time. He can't afford a repetition of that. Not after everything else. ]
[ He keeps the pace ruthless, sensation piling up more rapidly than his overheating body can dissipate it. Sweat is breaking across his skin, clean and sharp; he feel the prickle of rising desperation across his nerves. His hands go everywhere across Korra's body, taking possession, mouth gasping as she presses her thirsty kisses into it. The hot pressure matches that sweet sucking pull of her sex. Each time, he slides in deep, rocks his hips in a wicked grind, withdrawing only to slickly plunge back in. It feels like he'll never slow down or stop -- he can't bear to. But he can't bear to come yet either -- not until she's breaking apart beneath him, a crumpled sobbing ruin of flesh as he pounds her. ]
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Date: 2014-10-13 03:52 am (UTC)Korra's ribs start complaining as he continues slamming her into the mattress; the pain doesn't detract from the pleasure at all. She even arches up against him, trying to put more pressure on the bruise, which seems to be wired directly to her clit. She's going to come any second now, no matter how hard she fights it off. One little press in the right spot and she'll —
Shatter.]
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