blending in, smoothing out

[anatural]

WHO: Hei & Korra
WHAT: Korra gives Hei a haircut.

[Korra frowns as she takes a section of hair between two fingers and tries, with great care, to trim the edges with a pair of scissors she borrowed from the woman at the front desk. The result is, as she feared, not good. The scissors just aren't sharp enough to make a clean cut.

She could just live with it. It's been this way for a few months now and didn't bother her before. That was the problem with being depressed, though — nothing much bothers you, because you simply don't care about anything. It's only now that Korra's starting to realize just how far she had sunk, and she knows she hasn't climbed out of the hole yet. In fact, she's pretty sure she's just riding high on endorphins at the moment, courtesy of an entire day's worth of fucking.

She doesn't want to just live with it. It's a small challenge, making it less obvious that she just chopped off her hair with a hunting knife, but that's why she doesn't want to admit defeat to it.

So what are you going to do about it? Katara voices her thoughts.

With one last squint of disapproval at her hair, Korra pokes her head out the bathroom door.]

You didn't bring a sharpening stone, did you?

Comments

[mortemscintilla]

Korra...

[ He's not sure how, exactly, he can tell something is wrong. Maybe it's the unflexing rigidity that sinks into her muscles. Maybe it's the miscrospasms beneath her skin, as if panic is bubbling in wild burls beneath the surface. Or maybe it's the way her breathing changes -- a singing inhale like when he'd first cut her. The real percussion of her pain. Not the blade, but what it leaves behind. ]

[ Carefully, he sets the stylus aside. His hands, cool and rough, red whorls smeared into the fingertips of the right, curl gently around both her shoulders. It's not a restraint. He kneads the supple tendons of muscle, drawn taut like wickerwork, stroking along the back of her neck and down between her shoulderblades. Her tense profile seems etched as if in dark bronze; her gaze is empty and edgeless like someone caught in a blowback of memory. ]

[ When he speaks, it's firm, but almost impossibly soft -- that brand of buttercrunch and chocolate he rarely uses except with doomed marks or precious children. ]

Breathe.

[anatural]

[He speaks and the chain shatters into millions of silver pieces. They sink into the bed, into her skin, into his skin and she has to fight back panic. It’s not real. You’re just going crazy.]

I'm fine. [She shakes his hands off and scoots forward, needing some space and hating herself for it.] Is letting it keep bleeding part of the thrill, or can I go heal up now? [She sounds so cold, so angry, so detached and she doesn't want to because none of those feelings are directed at him. She feels like she's under someone else's control.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ She jerks away, and Hei resists the urge to reach for her. Bereft of her warmth, his skin feels clammy, the cold air curling around his cock, which still juts at an angle across his belly, dark and slick-tipped and somehow obscenely inappropriate right now. Almost self-consciously, like he's stumbled somewhere he shouldn't be, he reaches for an edge of the sheet, as if in an echo of boyhood decency. But it dissipates in the next beat; tipping his chin, he regards her straight-on. ]

[ It's strange. Korra's face is a blur in the gloom, as if blotted with a dark stain, features indistinguishable. Only her eyes retain their sharp delineations, blue and intense. Except it's not her eyes he sees. It's his own, staring back at him -- a bite of glacial ferocity. Deja vu makes his nape tingle. He takes a slow breath, fighting down his kneejerk urge to match sharpness with sharpness, like two crossed blades in a duel. ]

[ Instead, feeling immeasurably tired and sad for her, he says, ]

Take all the time you need.

[ He doubts there's going to be any sex, but that's fine. He needs to dress up and head to town to replenish supplies anyway. ]

[anatural]

[A part of her wishes that he would, so she'd actually have something to get angry about. But no, he's patient and gentle, which only highlights how unreasonable and overwrought her own feelings are. She flees into the bathroom and draws some water out of the tap. The cuts are gone in the space of a heartbeat. If only all wounds healed so easily.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Overwrought, yes. Unreasonable? That's not the right word. Her coldness is almost scorching, but he can't summon his usual acidic disdain to neutralize it. Not when he knows what it's rooted in. Things he can't attempt not to know, dark spots of shadow that can metamorphose with a single trigger into dragons and bite. It makes him ache with pity, but also intrigue. Korra is such a mess now. But she is a fascinating, infuriating, gorgeous mess. It calls something in Hei -- something the original sweet-seventeen Korra, with her brightness and purity, never could. The dark spell of weather within her is not all dark. Not like his at all. Instead it blazes with lightning. In places, it is almost luminous. ]

[ The little about her trauma she's revealed -- with hair-trigger wildness and sparking jitters -- the pain of her situation, her need, feeds something in Hei's empty chest that has been famished since Pai left. ]

[ Perhaps long before that. ]

[ Through the closed door, he listens to the rustle of Korra's movements. He's ordered a big earthenware tureen from downstairs, sloshing with sudsy water, a sea sponge floating around in it like a porous potato. Meticulously, he cleans himself up, his erection softened into nothing but a harsh backed-up ache in his balls. He dresses quickly, before stripping off the bedsheets, splotched with blood like they were the scene of a defloration more than a murder. ]

[ He dumps them in a corner, then, without a plan, goes to the bathroom door. Knocks gently, before murmuring, neutral-toned, ]

I'm heading out. You need anything?

[ Stupid question to ask. But it's a rule, one of many rules he'd absorbed from his team in Heaven's War, that when you were heading to town for supplies it was right that you volunteered your services, demonstrating that you'd go out of your way for a price, even when it was raining, and a pain in the ass, and you were tired with a few drinks under your belt. Even when in all other ways you were a murdering son of a bitch. ]

[anatural]

[Korra's staring at the shower, wondering if it's worth taking a second bath but mostly just blank, sunk into an emptiness without thought. Hei's voice startles her out of it.]

No, I'm fine. Thanks.

[mortemscintilla]

[ I'm fine. He knows what that word signifies in her. What it covers up, same as in him. Dark currents, darker waters further out. And at their heart, a maelstrom of perfect emptiness. He wishes there was something he could say, or do, to dispel those feelings she carries. But he knows they exist quite apart from him, in a dimension he can't tangibly reach. All he can do is accept those wounds and try not to create new ones. ]

[ It's harder than it seems. Trauma, without its framework of clinical diagnoses, is an extremely volatile creature. No matter how hard he tries to respond caringly, he's bound to do or say something that will set her off -- spark a flare of temper, solidify a glaze of ice. He has to be prepared for that. He's lived it -- still does -- but that doesn't mean he knows how to make it better. She has to find the cure -- or at least the palliative -- at her own pace. So does he. ]

[ Which is why he doesn't prod her. Instead he takes three slow breaths, fingers trailing along the flimsy surface of the door to drop away. Murmurs, ] I'll be back in an hour, [ in the same rasping tone anyone else would use to say, I love you. Then he's turning on his heel, quitting the room quietly, but without a backward glance. ]