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 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. ]