across time & space

[anatural]

WHO: Hei & Korra
WHAT: Hei’s been missing for years.

[Are you sure you don’t want me to stay? As Korra watches Mako walk down the beach path, she kind of regrets telling him she was fine. The air feels a lot chillier without his companionable warmth. But he's no better at comfort sex than Bolin is; they're both too romantic. Of all her friends, Asami's the only one who really understands the occasional need for intimacy without its attendant baggage. Too bad Asami's out of town.

Korra smiles and shakes her head as she opens the front door. It doesn't matter. Nights like this are why she remodeled the house so Naga could come inside. The polar bear dog's warm, solid presence is like a campfire, a soft blanket, and hot tea all in one affectionate package.

Speaking of — Naga pokes her head out of the bedroom door and whines a question.]

I'm sorry, girl. She didn't make it. [Even with Korra to stabilize her wounds and the best vet in Republic City, Cat's injuries from the hit & run accident were too severe.

One by one, everything that connects her to Hei is vanishing. A few months after he was officially declared dead, Yin went missing. Her black cat died, and some guy with a poodlebird from Future Industries took all the computer equipment. She's had to renovate the house a few times, due to storms and other emergencies. And now Cat.

It makes Korra feel sad, but mostly it makes her feel old. The normal bumps and pains that occur over a lifetime have been crammed into less than a decade; she's still a few years shy of thirty, but she feels like she's her mother's age sometimes.

Naga nuzzles her shoulder comfortingly, and Korra takes the invitation to wrap her arms around her and bury her face in the polar bear dog's fur.]

I'm tired of losing people.

Comments

[mortemscintilla]

[ She comes in a gorgeous, rolling spasm, and Hei can feel the fluttering tremors across his tongue, under his grappling hands. He's so caught up in the thrilling sight of her that he doesn't notice the tang of blood until it fills his mouth. Blinking, he jerks back, dragging a hand across his mouth, the fingertips sheened in a slick thread of blood. The sight makes his gorge rise -- but it's more because he's afraid he's torn her with his teeth. His cock, which had filled with a sluggish interest as she'd tossed and turned, wilts at the idea. ]

Shit. [ It's a voice suddenly bereft of ease and finesse. ] Are you okay?

[anatural]

I am so much more than okay... [Still, hearing the concern in his voice, she pushes herself onto her elbows and looks at him. Him, with blood on his fingers and smeared across his mouth.]

Are you okay?!?! [What could have happened to him down there? She's not hiding anything sharp between her legs... Is he coughing up blood? Bleeding from his nose? A warm squirt from her vagina answers both their questions. She covers her mouth to stifle an embarrassed choke of laughter.]

I didn't know it was going to start today...

[mortemscintilla]

[ (Nosebleeds? He isn't from that sort of anime.) ]

[ Hei's gaze wanders worriedly from her face to her spread thighs. He can see it then, the blood seeping out, tingeing the lips of her sex, gathering in the curls. The sight of it, the bubbling red clot, the coppery hot smell, makes him blink, first with bewilderment, then with -- Oh. The stirrings of mild disgust break across his surface, but fade in the next beat. Strange, how the sight of all that red, spilling obscenely between her legs, usually makes his mind switch to automatic technical terms. Vagina. Uterus. Menstruation. All distant, all clinical. It doesn't bother him particularly. He's fucked enough pussies that were bleeding, although he's never gone down on one. Unhygienic, but also ... crossing a line, somehow. ]

[ But there's none of that detachment with Korra. Hard to summon any, when you've shacked up with a girl for months and months. When you once kept tabs on her cycle with the same matter-of-factness as when to change the oil in the car, when to mow the lawn. He'd always labeled that week as Hands Off days, and busied himself with chores or tinkering with weaponry. ]

[ Absently, he wipes the drying blood on his lips. It has an almost grossly slippery texture -- nothing like the richness of arterial blood. ]

[ When he glances up at her, his face is a blend of secondhand embarrassment, unease, and a hint of disappointment. ]

I guess you'll want to clean up.

[ And cut short any prospective fucking. ]

[anatural]

[She kinda does, but more importantly...]

Don't you? You're the one with blood all over your face. [And the discomfort with menstruation. It was hard too miss how willing he was to indulge her high sex drive... Unless she was on the rag. Then she was on her own. She never minded; they had sex so often that this was the only time she had to masturbate. How he could get off on cutting people and yet be bothered by perfectly natural womanly bleeding, she'll never understand. But it's just the way he is. So his evident disappointment at the break to get clean is kind of a surprise.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ It doesn't bother him. He's seen enough blood to last a lifetime. But edgeplay draws a line of transgression -- and for him, all transgressive lines are erotically tempting to cross. He's interested in exploring people, their limitations, their boundaries. But that interest stems from his ambivalence to enumerating and delineating limits in his own intimate relations with the world. Whereas fucking his girlfriend on her period ... just strikes him as messy. Nothing taboo or profane about it. Just a natural bodily function, like pissing or shitting -- but one he prefers to allot her privacy in. ]

[ Korra's remark makes him blink, just as something stretches and ripples in his mind, taking the shape of a dim epiphany. That where he'd withdrawn physical attention, every time she was on the rag, because the workings of those girly-parts didn't interest him any more than the needs of bowels and bladders -- it was possible she'd interpreted it as distaste. In some shelf of his mind he still thinks of her as a Good Girl -- the ones who don't let their boyfriends get a legover during that time of the month. So he hadn't pressed. (He could have. But the idea of pushing her into something against her will -- once a matter of natural course, a way to satisfy his own selfish entitlement -- had instead awakened an instinctive recoil. He should've realized, at that moment, how terminally lovestruck -- whipped -- he'd grown.) ]

[ When he touches her, it's gentle, a skim of fingertips along her calf. In a tone that's mild, but somehow questioning, ]

Blood doesn't bother me. I just assumed --

[ That it bothered you. ]

[anatural]

[Blink. Blink.]

It happens every month. I'm pretty used to it by now. [She's never been bothered by the cramps, aches, or mood swings that always troubled her mother. Her period has always been a messy but otherwise unremarkable part of the month. (Actually, if it had any effect on her, it made her a little more horny.) The idea of avoiding sex just because of her period would never have occurred to her.]

[mortemscintilla]

So its okay if...

[ He doesn't finish. Just caresses her thigh with a questioning delicacy, feeling a startling leap of hunger break in his ribs. Even as his mind tells him it is ridiculous to be so easily pleased, his body melts with helpless hard-edged need. (God, how long has it been since he's opened up to the feeling instead of shutting it out?) He wants to fuck her. Like a cat in heat, he is flushed with it -- but hinky too, of getting it wrong in some undefined way. He's known so many women who are always ready to be wounded in that very female way women can be. Over a careless remark about their cycle, the messiness of the blood, its smell, the way it congeals. As if that nether valley is a permanent wound forever waiting to split open and bleed at even the mildest criticism. All it will take is one tiny gesture of disregard, one misinflected word. ]

[ Craning his neck, he kisses her instead, first on the mouth, then in a circuit around her chin and cheeks and forehead. ]

[ With a quiet obliqueness, ]

Do you have condoms?

[anatural]

Yeah. [It comes out as a sigh, full of warmth and want. She can faintly taste the blood on his mouth, which yeah, okay, is kinda gross, but there are a lot of things that are gross about sex and that's why you take baths afterwards. She runs her hands along his arms; almost wraps them around him to pull him down, but stops when he asks about condoms.

Condoms... Shit, when was the last time she bought condoms? She hasn't actually needed any in awhile.]

I...don't remember.

[mortemscintilla]

[ (Lesbians really do save a lot of money on birth control. Lucky bitches.) ]

[ Hei can feel the fever she radiates, her breaths sweet and lush against his mouth. In a single moment she seems to have become almost unbearably excited; his own pleasure tastes like validation, and he is filled to the brim with a sudden, suffocating impatience. ]

[ He's about to cover her, to deepen the kiss, when she falters. Dammit. Squeezing his eyes shut, he takes a moment to recognize the crawling moment as what capsulizes the very crux of his sex-life, before he draws back to regard her. His smile is almost a grimace -- the thin, dry, sour curl of a lemon peel. ]

Tell me I don't need to run to the drugstore.

[ He's not in the mood for last-moment grocery runs after being catapulted through different dimensions, okay. ]

[anatural]

It's not like I've really needed them. You've been gone for three years. [Just because she understands the grimace doesn't mean she appreciates it. Huffing irritably, she pushes him off.] Let me check the bathroom. [Which will also give her a chance to clean some of the blood from between her legs. After so many years believing it squicked Hei out, she can't quite immediately switch over to the knowledge that it doesn't. Plus it just feels a little gross.

A few quick wipes gets her clean, and a check of the medicine cabinet reveals a box of condoms...that's empty. Well shit.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ The need, jangling so shrill and strong in Hei's bones, dissipates as Korra pads away. Left alone, he could loll in bed, which is warm, the sheets giving off a sweet aroma of Korra-ness, the mattress half-sunken from the impression of her body. Instead, he gets up, the restless bloodhound in him wanting to re-examine the room, to explore any deeper changes. The whole house feels so strange to him. Changed in a million tiny ways that, taken together, seem massive. It's like not seeing your own face for eight years, then having someone hand you a mirror. Who is that guy? And then you realize: it's you. It's still you. ]

[ Eventually, bored, disoriented, aimless, he gets a lychee drink and goes to lean outside the bathroom. The door is closed. Through its cracks ekes the muffled sounds of Korra searching for something -- fruitlessly. Eyes closed, he holds the cool bottle to his forehead and sighs. ]

There's nothing in there, hm?

[anatural]

[Oh fuck off, you long-suffering asshole.] There's PLENTY in here. [Just nothing useful. Korra's own temper is frayed by both frustrated desire and the shock of his return. A second before she slams the cabinet shut and orders him out, she sees a small packet of herbs Bolin & Opal had given her. Bolin had bought them because the name had Naga in it, and had been horrified when Opal told him what they really were. He'd given them to Korra anyway, because Opal — though Korra wasn't entirely sure what message the young airbender was trying to send her. Either way... She opens the door and holds up the packet.]

Unless you have any diseases I should know about, we're covered.

[mortemscintilla]

None. Unless waiting is a disease.

[ Hei watches her in wry amusement, those quiet, ever-cresting surges of affection for her displacing his earlier impatience and distracting him, however briefly, from worry about Yin and Mao, collapsed networks, stolen time and wasted opportunities. ]

[ His gaze glints toward the packet, ascertaining its contents, before his eyes resettle on her, fanning up and down. The sight of her -- all nude and shining and tossed-about, skin blotched pink with the force of his kisses -- makes him at once jelly-limbed and rampant, but also almost absurdly solemn. This is such a narrow save. All these years she hadn't known he was out there somewhere, and today, if events hadn't unfurled with such perfect, jarring serendipity -- God. ]

[ What if she'd fallen in love with someone else in all that time? Had a family? Forgotten him? ]

[ He tries not to think about it. Instead he snatches her wrist, drawing her up close, his own body a hot rough wall. The juice bottle dangles loosely from his fingers; he sets it aside, his mouth dipping low to nudge and connect with hers, even as he moves them towards the bedroom in a way that is like a halting foxtrot. Backing her up in stages, as if his mind isn't quite sure even now that he is going to get away with this -- while all his senses can do is drink her in. He can almost smell how aroused she is -- the humid scent of her wafting up from her cleavage, that coppery hormonal fug between her thighs. ]

[ Carefully, he tumbles back with her across the bed. Breaks away on an inhale, with enough presence of mind to grab a towel from the rack, to spread it across the sheets beneath her. Somehow it's that gesture, the signifier of innate neatness, of a meticulous regard for stains and dirt, that makes him realize, with something like a thump between the shoulderblades, that he's really home. ]

[ He wants to say something. But his hands are grappling Korra closer, hips, waist, shoulders, burying themselves in her hair. He stops only to kiss her, sloppy and biting and insatiable, unable for a long minute to do anything else but kiss and kiss, getting lost in her hot pliant little mouth. ]

[anatural]

That doesn't even make any sense. [This is said with affection instead of annoyance. They're back on track — not just today, with the condom interruption over, but in their lives. He's back where he's supposed to be.

The save is not nearly as narrow as Hei thinks. Korra had no interest in finding another relationship after she lost him. Relationships are work, work that is unnecessary if your only goal is sexual release. She's never felt compelled to start a family; she doesn't need a partner to feel her life is complete. She never would have fallen in love with Hei if circumstances hadn't bound them so tightly together; it would have taken circumstances nearly as remarkable for her to grant someone else a space in her heart and his place in her life.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ That makes two of them. It's almost miraculous, that given his fossilized traumas, his fraught and fucked-up human relationships, his faulty emotional thermometer, the blood-drenched Battle Royale of his childhood, that he's managed to spark and click with someone so different, and that the connection has stretched across years and upheaval into something so solid and real. It astonishes him -- Korra astonishes him. She was never what he'd expected then, and she isn't what he expects now. ]

[ He enjoys it, that electric hum under his skin, because it's been decades since something has surprised him so rewardingly. ]

[ He tries to tell her that. With deep gulping kisses between ragged breaths, a soft fuck fuck fuck in his mind because he knows he's gasping her name into the humid space between their mouths. With the trembling strain of backed-up need as he gathers her close, his erection an entrapped roll of flesh that radiates a hot pulsing, skidding moistly across her skin with an imperfect friction that is both pleasure and pain. Hooking his arms under her knees, he draws her legs up high and tight around him. Angles their bodies, at once practiced and clumsy, so his prodding cockhead snags against the seeping red folds of her sex. ]

[ He doesn't break their kiss. Instead he slows it, letting it melt into something lingering, soft, his senses hooked for a moment by the hot sweetness of her mouth, the kindling rub of her breasts against his chest, the braided arms and legs and the way their skins stick and unstick -- sweat-hot, damp. ]

[ Then he can't think anymore. A slick nudge, a twitch of his hips -- and he's inside her. First an electric inch, a shaky retreat, and then a slippery stroke that seals his pubic bone against her, a full, juddering invasion of hard flesh as his groan vibrates raspily against her mouth. ]

[anatural]

[It's hardly an invasion when it's been so warmly invited. His dick is more like a welcome guest, or maybe a warrior returned safely from a great battle, greeted with fireworks and dancing and celebrations. Welcome home, her body says to him, tightening around him, trembling, moaning. And perhaps also Don’t ever leave again.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Hei reads the signals clearly, even through the drugging timbre of sensations that judder through him. It is a lose-yourself upspiraling -- the slick fluttering squeeze of her, how his own body is so oversensitized he's aware of the cool texture of the sheets, the hot rub of Korra's thighs and arms ribboned around him, the sheen of sweat across her breasts and running down between their pressed bellies. An overload of hazy heat dropping over his vision, yet so slow and deep, shaking him to the core. ]

[ Gathering his breath, he props himself up on trembling elbows. Kisses the hair scattered damply across Korra's face, ruffled by his breath, before nuzzling his nose against hers, a moment of piquant sweetness. When he starts to rock, it's gentle -- a fluid circling of his hips, slow pushes and deep pressure. Between their bodies, across the expanse of bare skin, between her raised knees, he watches himself sink into her. Feeds himself into the red mess of her sex, swollen and seeping, streaking his cock with blood each time he pulls partways out of her. ]

[ It should be strange -- the awkward spectacle of copulation turned into artful butchery. But it's not her blood he's interested in. It's her. Being steeped in her, breathing in the pungency of her scent, loving the smooth fit of their bodies, the dueling pulse of their stymied pleasure. ]

[anatural]

[Korra's not sure whether it's the fact that it's been three years or if bareback has always felt like this. Why didn't they do it like this all of the time? Because you don’t want to get pregnant, she has enough presence of mind to remind herself. Or diseases which those herbs would do nothing to prevent. Sex like this is a risk.

He presses in deeper, hitting that one spot that always makes her scream, and she decides it's a risk she'd happily take more often.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Things like pregnancy and disease are far from Hei's thoughts. He's too absorbed with kissing her, deep delving licks, his memory and Korra's body quivering in echo of each other. He doesn't move his hips much -- just the smallest inevitable shifts and slides, shaky and savored. Not because he doesn't want to end this prematurely, but because he wants to prolong this as much as he can possibly stand to. The rift of several months -- years for her -- seems something that had happened long ago, already half forgotten, merely the occasion and backdrop for their desire. But it is a deliberate shutting out, a deferral. Time enough tomorrow for the minutae of searches and rebuilding, when the world starts up again. ]

[ But here, now, golden dust-motes glitter across the sinewaves of the sunlight, and Hei feels skinned, raw, yet perfectly sealed within his body, nerves and blood abuzz. The day is at its zenith, the room quiet and hot, a cocoon that can only last so long before cracking open and forcing them out. It doesn't matter. His blanketing weight across the Korra, and the minute, gorgeous friction of her skin, the flutters and clenches of muscle inside and out, are a promise. ]

[ This. Us. You and me. They have time to get things right. ]

[anatural]

[Some things are better off deferred. Right now is a reminder of what they had, a reason to do the hard work of rebuilding. This is what makes it worth it. Not just the sex itself, but all the things that they manage to say without words. She and Asami always talked a lot — checking in, joking, giggling. A part of her wants to say I love you, out of habit and because it's true, but he's kissing her too much and she can't get it out.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ She can't get it out, and Hei's own head feels like it is full of sawdust, his skin hot and his eyes dry and painful. His emotions are a formless, terrifying chaos. So he keeps kissing Korra, slow and sipping, tracing her lips with his tongue, swapping salt-spit until their tastes mingle. God, he's seen not hide nor hair of her in ages; each inch of her feels like a benediction. Just the smell of her, layers of soap and shampoo, sweat and her own loamy mist-in-forests self, clean and warm and herbal, makes him want to burrow into her and never leave. ]

[ When the words bloom in his mind, they're small yet impossibly bright and painful, like a bone cracked back into place. ]

I love you.

[ The admission comes readily, his voice thready but determinedly frank. His eyes, glinting between shuttered spikes of lashes, are dark and soft yet somehow incongruously diffident. Then he's wriggling a hand between their bodies, so his thumb finds her clitoris, and after a few slippery swipes the rest of his fingers curl under, wedging and pressing in. A hot pressure there where he knows she likes it best. ]

[anatural]

[She stares at him, not blankly but a bit flummoxed. He said it so rarely, it would have been a surprise to hear even three years ago, but after all this time... The words are on the tip of her tongue, but his fingers turn them into an incoherent cry. She whacks his shoulder, a half-hearted scold.]

I love you too. [She gasps it out, the words barely intelligible. She'll punish him for that later — she'll sit on his lap and say "I love you" over and over again until his brain bleeds out. (Of course she won't — that level of sentimentality would gross her out.)]

[mortemscintilla]

[ No, please don't do that. At the rate he's overloading, he might shut himself off completely, a fritzing psychological bluescreen, because he is so boiling with the stew of his emotions and want that the words, their ease, their soft exit across his tongue, their impermanence, seem almost one-dimensional. He wants instead to etch Korra into his mind and burn all her thoughts, her essence, into his hard drive. Laughable, because they're two different people, and if they're torn apart again, he can't hold on to even the smallest atom of her. Fragrance. Eyelash. A dusting of her skin. He'd realized that, during the bleak stretch of his journey in space. She's not here. I'm alone. I, I, I. And how dreary it was, to be alone on that massive ship, even amidst the bustle of the crew, even with Chekov's bright company, making 'I's at himself. ]

[ They could be little bones, these stand-ins for himself. A boring rune he'd cast, monotonous without Korra. ]

[ Forcibly, he lets the thoughts jostle loose and fade away. Better to focus on Korra: the way she whacks his shoulder, the flavor of her words, slurred and running together like a dizzyingly sweet syrup. He doesn't say anything. He just goes back to kissing her, his breath rising and straining in his lungs. She is delicious, wet, throbbing, and he can get off not only on the feel of her but the fact of her. It is all the gift of a random universe that has focused itself in the girl spilled beneath him. ]

[ With a low, prickly buzz in his throat, he melts into a deeper rhythm, where he can push base of his pubic bone against her mons, rocking inside her in a heavy, insistent pulse, the cadence of a heartbeat, and at the same time grind the heel of his hand roughly against Korra's clit. ]

[anatural]

[Would Korra feel the same, if their positions had been reversed? Losing him had made her miserable, and a part of her would never stop grieving, but the world had never seemed dreary or bleak for long. It needed too much from her. But out in space, without her role to anchor her, maybe she would have felt that same loneliness. Hopefully they never have to find out.

Something wet trickles down her face as her climax slams all of the air out of her lungs; she thinks it's sweat at first, only to realize that she's crying. Deep, bone-quaking sobs of relief and release.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Hei can feel Korra's tears sliding between their fused mouths, shockingly hot and salty. Her sobs, melting, gorgeously musical, feed a thick, strangling sensation in his chest, beyond sadness or coherent feeling. Don't cry, he wants to tell her. Except his own throat feels so tight, and his vision swims even though his eyes are bone-dry, a depthless drywell of tears. ]

[ Helpless, he can only rock against her, a rapid and unexpected series of spasms in his hips and belly, a pulse of warmth, his mind a whorling blur of fuck, fuck, fuck, while Korra's whole body seems to grip his, craving what it wants, striving for it, sucking him slickly in. The sight of her, skin mottled, head thrown back, breasts pushed forward and high splotches of color on her cheeks beneath the dark half-moons of her lashes, gummed into dark spikes because she's crying, her whole body a trapped yet exultant physical ululation -- all of it shoves him abruptly, irresistibly into climax. He feels a strangled groan drag out of him. Clings to Korra, buried impossibly deep, and, however strange it feels, being tossed from one dimension to the next ... he is home. ]