nothing's right and everything hurts

[anatural]

WHO: Korra & Hei
WHAT: Everything hurts.

[Korra feels like she hasn't breathed in almost a month, not since she came home to find Mai alone, choking on her own vomit.

Of course Hei would choose to abandon them just when their daughter gets sick -- the kind of sick that requires doctors and a long term stay in the hospital. She would have taken Mai with her to mediate the dispute (a simple case between the city government and a group of protestors, all of whom were willing to be reasonable once there was a third party around), except Hei walked through the door just as she was leaving, and it just seemed more practical to hand the fussy baby over to him. If she’d just known that Hei was going to leave, and that Mai’s fussing was the sign of a terrible illness...

She’s been holding her breath ever since, terrified that any movement could send Mai down the path of no recovery. When she gets word from Asami that Hei has been found in a hospital at the edge of Republic City — that’s when her heart stops beating.

She walks slowly into his hospital room, feeling disjointed and detached and hardly real. She’s already forgotten what the doctor had said about his condition; she was in too much shock to listen. She’s never seen Hei like this: bandaged, hooked up to beeping machines, helpless. She feels herself start to tremble. He’s always known when to bail from a fight, how to make a strategic retreat. The only way he gets this banged up is by intention. He wanted to be beaten to death.]

You fucking bastard...

[Anger burns deep in her belly. His familiar smell, and the accompanying twinge of arousal, only add fuel to the fire. Biting back tears, she slaps him hard. It makes her palm sting and her clit twitch. So she slaps him again.]

Comments

[mortemscintilla]

[ She bristles, volume and pitch rising -- and Mai's own crying grows louder, harsher, before it breaks into frantic gasping sobs. His whole body feels hollow, a cold wind blowing through him even as sweat beads down his spine. He wants to reach for Mai, to cradle that warm squirming baby-morsel against him. How could he lose track of this, lose track of her, the miracle of her, the entire perfection and fascination of her? How not love her entirely and in every single moment, because she is Korra all over again, and because she is so beautifully herself? ]

[ All of this seems very clear to Hei, need beating through his veins and muscles and flesh, strong as that stymied killer that keeps him alive in times of disaster, strong as the passion that binds him to Korra. That anything could obscure that seems to him absurd. The numbness he'd felt before is barely worth considering. Why should it close him off from what he loves? ]

[ He loves. He does. ]

[ They'd never know it, because he's ruined all his chances to show them. ]

[ His voice sounds strange -- too soft and shy -- when he speaks. ]

I'll leave. But ... don't turn me away without this. Please.

[anatural]

[She needs to call for a skybison. She needs to pack. She needs to let various people know that she will be out of town for...however long she's going to be out of town. She doesn't have the emotional energy to fight him and the voices of her friends.

She sighs in defeat.]

I'm going to put her in her playpen. You can watch her there. [Korra will be in the next room if anything happens.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ There is a deflated exhaustion about her that unnerves him. He was expecting her to put up a bigger fight. He wants to ask what's happened with her parents -- but he's wary of prodding. She won't quite meet his eyes, is subdued as a shy girl entertaining unwelcome company, not like herself at all. He feels for her, after how open she'd been with him, all that intimacy and warmth that now seems so vanishingly far from him. ]

[ He drifts indoors carefully. It is nearly dark, the pale brown walls and carpet absorbing what light filters down the stained-glass windows, the shoji paneling of smallish planes alit with a ghostly glow. Lots of toys scattered around -- his little puss is as spoilt as ever. No signs of imminent foreclosure and travel. ]

[ So why is she going back home? ]

[ It must be an emergency. Something disastrous. It would be like her, completely like her, to hide it, deny it. She's got too much in common with him -- foremost being that tendency to stay closemouthed until the last moment. Infuriating, proud, foolhardy woman. ]

[ Hei tries not to dwell on it. He's wavery as it is -- a cold-water shiver riding his spine as if he's been granted an audience with some awesome potentate, who is condescending to him by agreeing to this impromptu playdate. In her playpen, Mai crawls with a puppyish eagerness, the crying jag fading into a nonsense prattle that googles sweetly in his ear. Gripping the edges of her cage with fat fists, she tries to hoist herself up -- with little success. ]

[ Gently, Hei reaches out and helps her. With her impetuous little hands clasped in his, he feels something he would never have guessed he could feel: the thrill of flesh against delicate flesh. He, who has had brushes and battles with thousands of strangers, and grown insensible to all but the crudest handlings, now experiences a spark, almost a shock, of tactile initiation; and with that shock comes shyness. How gross and hard his own fingers are in comparison with Mai's. Is the child disgusted by the cracked surface of his skin? How snugly or loosely should their hands clasp? And who will decide when they let go? ]

[ Don't overthink it. He tries to focus every cell in his body on the Now. On the luminous blue of Mai's eyes. At the way she peers up at him with her head thrown all the way back, like a tropistic sunflower. Her clean little girl scent of talcum and milk, and the tiny perfection of her paws under his stroking hands. ]

[ His pulse is a heavy drag; slow, sad. Helpless with love for her, and anger at what he's done to himself and thus to her and Korra. ]

[ He'd wrecked his struggled-for life, and Korra's too, as surely as he'd squandered his happiness. ]

[anatural]

[Korra hates leaving Mai alone with him. She's sorely tempted to drag the playpen closer to the kitchen so she can better keep an eye on them while she makes the necessary calls, but she doesn't want Hei to overhear anything. He gave up the right to be a part of her life when he tried to get himself killed., and she doesn't want him to think otherwise.

Taking a deep breath, she dials the number for Air Temple Island. Blesses her good fortune when it's one of the new acolytes who picks up, so she doesn't have to explain why she needs the skybison. That's the last lucky break she gets. The president requires an explanation, which Korra struggles to give without crying. She hoped the woman would offer to give the explanations to the council and various other people she needs to inform, but the woman isn't known for her consideration. (You could call Asami, but she's still too angry about the invitation to ask her girlfriend for help) The secretary for the council ends up being so kind and sweet that Korra's last defenses crumble and she starts sobbing.

Avatar! Avatar Korra! A-are you all right?! She can't stop crying enough to answer.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Dust motes float lazily in the sun's dying red rays. Hei has scooted closer to the playpen, his plain brown parcel unwrapped to disclose a colorful music cube. Big-eyed, Mai pokes and prods at the buttons, listening to the peals of mechanical birdsong, the skirling renditions of old jazz classics. Soon enough, she grows bored and fixates on the discarded wrapping-paper. Happily, she tears it to bits, and with each messy rip, lets off a garbled string of syllables, eep-ooo-paaah! or meeeheeh or boo-ta-tet! ]

[ Figures, Hei thinks dryly. An embarrassment of multicolored gadgets and gizmos -- yet she's happiest playing with a crumpled ball of newsprint. ]

[ Minutes melt away. An entirely innocent curiosity suffuses him: he wants to watch Mai play and babble and fuss. Wants to watch her face for the ways she resembles Korra, Pai. As he listens to her squeals of high-pitched delight, clasps her pudgy hands, captures her and lifts her aloft, tummy balanced on one large palm, his damaged hand seems to absorb the palliative aura around her. He has the beginning of a feeling -- in his fingertips, in his pulse -- that there might be more where that came from. The well that is nothing but mud might bubble anew. ]

[ Eventually, her mouth still curled with traces of tired-out mirth, Mai stretches out next to a massive beetle-bison, asleep on her belly with a toy police car clutched in her hand. Smoothing the wispy tufts of her hair, Hei drinks everything in greedily. He almost wants to gather her up, a warm replete armful, except he can't afford to set Korra's alarm bells off. His access rights are hanging by a thread of goodwill as it is. ]

[ Quietly, he watches the hypnotic rise-and-fall of Mai's breathing. Waits for Korra to return, and shove him out. The time he's spent with Mai -- a radiant golden hour -- is already more than he deserves. ]

[ That's when he hears it. The sound of wet sniffles. The familiar heavy stir of sobs. Hei tenses, but it is a cautious tension, a vibrating skein wrapped around a solid wall of calm. Glancing at Mai, he determines she's down for the count. Then, succumbing to premonition, he makes his way to the kitchen. ]

...Korra...?

[anatural]

[She's crying too hard to think. Her mind is a wash of images — memories of her father's last visit, memories from her pregnancy, memories from her childhood — and feelings. Grief. Frustration. Desperation. Rage. Everything mixed together, clogging her throat, strangling her from the inside. At some point she manages to hang up the phone, mostly to shut up the voice on the other end. She doesn't want people to see her pain.

Hei's presence is so unwelcome that it almost feels like an assault. Korra reaches blindly for something she can throw at him since she still can't speak; she ends up hurling a stool straight at his head.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He evades, even though he's well clear of the stool's trajectory. It crashes off the wall and hits the floor with a resounding thud, jagged wooden shards everywhere. Blinking, Hei glances toward the playpen, a sharp involuntary reflex. Mai stirs listlessly, lets off an irritable hiccoughing noise, then subsides into stillness. ]

[ Relief swells, before it's drowned by a chilly undertow of tension. He doesn't try to touch Korra. Doesn't step closer. Every cell in his body forks with conflicting imperatives. To leave -- because he's gotten a pretty vivid demo of how unwelcome he is. To stay -- because she radiates a bewildered pain that tugs exquisitely at his own, so carefully controlled and tamped down. ]

[ He puts a hand up on the doorframe, an unobtrusive specter at the fringes of her vision. When he speaks, concern laps at his voice, even as his face stays neutral, a distance cultivated to brace himself against heartache. He's sure she's going to drive him from the house like an exorcist expelling a poltergeist, a screaming litany of Getoutgetoutgetout! ]

... What it it?

sooooobbbb

[anatural]

[Why does it have to be Hei? It should be her dad here, playing with her baby. Her dad, asking her what's wrong. Her dad, comforting her because the asshole she gave 10 years of her life to broke her heart for good. Her dad was one of the most vibrant, active people she knows. He never would have invited death the way Hei did. Hei, who seemed little more than a walking corpse when he stood at her door. It is monumentally, colossally, breath-takingly unfair.]

It should have been you. [Her words are gasped out between sobs, barely intelligible.] Dad... He never... It should have been you!

;~~~;

[mortemscintilla]

[ It should have been you. For a long moment he can't figure out what she's just said. He blinks, streaming the words back through his head, searching for the sense, even as his throat crowds with horror. Then: ]

[ Oh. ]

[ Oh. ]

[ A strange sensation, dizzy and light, spreads up from his chest into his head, makes it buzz. His gorge rises like mercury shooting to red; his brains feel like they'll erupt from his skull and splatter all over the wall. It all makes sense now. He sees Korra, crumpled on the floor, her skin shiny with tears, dark strands of hair pasted across her cheeks, eyes blazing with hate. And. Cradled in Tonraq's arms, chains glinting on her wrists and ankles, the animation in her face fading, and everything Hei thinks he's believed and understood fading with it, a cracking wrongness as her breath hitches in slower rhythms, as something within her eyes begins moving slowly away, then leaves those rooms empty... ]

[ It should have been you. ]

[ For a moment, the kitchen disappears, voices and faces and so much hot salt blood swirling around Hei, rising and rising, consuming and pulling him under. ]

I know.

[ His voice sounds so flat, faraway. Like a bad phone connection, static and shifting space on the end of the line. He doesn't try to touch her; he keeps a wide expanse of tiled floor between them. Embraces or handholds or tender condolences are besides the point right now. Everything is. ]

[anatural]

[It's not hate. Perilously close, but mostly it's just soul-wrenching agony. Why is the man who wanted to die alive while the one who wanted to live is dead? She can't stop crying. She's afraid she'll never stop crying.

But eventually she does. She runs out of tears and energy, becomes nothing more than a boneless pile of exhausted grief on the floor. She can't bring herself to get up and do everything that still needs to get done... she wishes the world would just stop until she can piece herself back together.

She's surprised Hei hasn't left yet. She's dimly aware of how cruel her words were, even if she still believes them. She would have left if she were in his shoes.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He knows he should leave. That's where his expertise lies. Dropping the bombshell on the doorstep, ringing the bell and vanishing -- not in hanging around and making small talk about the shrubbery as he wracks his brain for the graceful exit line. ]

[ Except he can't leave. Not even the way he is -- faulty and limited in every facet, unable to transcend the killer his broken body houses. No man should live inside his skin after reaching such an understanding. Even a one-celled organism, a planarian worm, would turn itself inside-out. For a moment, he imagines edging closer to Korra. Kneeling before her, with his blade proffered. Telling her in an unwavering, soft voice. Kill me. Do it. The unresisting certainty nearly serene. He's stolen enough of her life. ]

[ Except it is unfair. Cowardly. History is crowded with men who've fled blood debts. He isn't going to ruin the rest of Korra's life by taking the quickest escape hatch, no matter how tangy-sweet the freedom tastes in the back of his tightened throat. He has to try to pay back in increments what he stole. In moments and hours and days. Even if it means decades of paying back what is essentially unrepayable. ]

[ He can't leave her -- not even for the release of death. ]

[ He sprawls in the chair near the door and lets her get on with it. The onslaught of grief will dribble away, soon enough. He knows that. Also knows that the numbness that breaks over her, afterward, will be twice as excruciating. It can't be bypassed. She'll have to experience it all. ]

[ He doesn't speak. Just watches as she cries for a very long time, shuddering, nearly breathless, except for the occasional sob. When it's over, she is subdued to a quiet, fevery tremor, a corpse crumpled up on the edge of the kitchen floor, pale as death, staring. Rising, he goes to the fridge. Nothing in there but a pitcher of lychee smoothie. It is almost too thick to be any good; he'd toss it and go fetch more, except for not wanting to leave her and Mai alone yet, or drag her out. ]

[ Pouring lukewarm tap-water into a glass, he hands it to her. ]

Drink. You'll feel better.

[anatural]

[She almost says "thank you," simply out of habit, but her throat is too dry. She takes the cup from his hands and forces herself to drink it; it takes a surprising amount of effort, and at several points she feels like she's going to drop the glass. Her tears drained her of all strength.

Her voice is almost unrecognizable when she speaks.]

Where's Mai? [It's not so much a question — she knows where she left her baby — as it is a confused plea. She wants the comfort of holding her daughter, but she can't move, and somehow it's easier to ask where her daughter is than it is to admit she can't stand.]

[mortemscintilla]

Asleep.

[ He can see how the exhaustion makes her hands vibrate faintly, a deep-rooted tremor like a delicate glass about to shatter at a high note. The sheen of tears on her face, glittering her skin like frost in the gloaming. So much anguish in her eyes -- it's excruciating to look at. Still beautiful, though. She'll never lose that. ]

[ He remembers the night in the shed, when he'd first watched her unravel, the sentence She's not meant to be near you came to mind: those blue eyes and that warm glow of loveliness. He'd pictured her in the South Pole -- face framed by a white fur hood, a range of snow-topped mountains rising in the distance. A scenery at once stunning and pristine, someplace he was never meant to leave footprints or red finger smudges. ]

[ Yet here he is -- trailing such a poisonous wake into her life that the two of them are near-constantly steeped in disaster, entwined, inescapable, like players in a Greek tragedy. ]

[ He wants to gather her in. Wants to smooth her hair, touch her hand, do something. But his own guilt stymies him. It feels as though he's taking enough liberties as it is. ]

[ When he speaks, his voice is a quiet weight: ]

You should get some rest too. I'll ... make the calls. If you want.

[ It's what he's done half his lifetime. Handled the details, the travel arrangements, the calls, the traps -- caught not so much in the eye of the storm but a pocket of needful detachment -- to do what must be done. ]

[anatural]

[I don’t want to rest. I want my daughter.] I've made the calls. I just need to pack.

[She pulls herself to her feet, hating how her body trembles. She's in no condition to pick the baby up and she knows it, but she needs to touch her, even if she can't hold her. Mai is the only connection to her father she has right now... The love she feels for her daughter is an echo of the love her father felt for her, and she wants to wrap herself in it.] I'm going to check on Mai.

[mortemscintilla]

[ She rises on wobbly legs, trying to shake off her momentary lapse. Hei can practically see the Korra-ness return in how she straightens her body, and he feels a quiet wash of relief. There was something as terrible to him in seeing her meltdown as in seeing her plunging her hands into the dirt of an open grave. The sight of her distress, her weakness, disquiets him at a level below speech, below conscious feeling. Korra is the strong one, the lodestar, and if she is broken, anything and everything might shatter in a moment. ]

[ He lets her go to Mai, giving her wide berth. Already he feels like a bystander; he's waiting to be dismissed so Korra can grieve in privacy. ]

[anatural]

[Korra doesn't dismiss him — she feels a queasy guilt about what she said to him, and she's afraid that if she does tell him to go, he'll take it as an invitation to try & kill himself again. She doesn't want that extra weight on her heart.

So she focuses on Mai, mustering enough strength to pick the sleeping baby up from her playpen, and manages to sit rather than fall back on the couch. It still wakes Mai up, and she starts crying loudly, flailing her arms and whacking Korra in the face. (She's as pleasant when woken up as her father is, Korra reflects with dark humor.)]

Can you get her bottle from the fridge? [If he's going to stick around, he might as well be useful.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Hei lets her scoop up Mai, who jostles awake and begins to scream, as loud as a car alarm. Her expression, in that moment, reminds him very much of her mother's: beautifully fierce, swimmy-eyed and grumpy. His head swims; he thinks of Tonraq's death, of Korra's anguish, and it is like a stone weighting down the air. A stone that is yet a lightness, because of the wonder, the golden chance, to be near Mai and Korra at all. ]

[ Terrible, he knows, to think of it that way. Gleaning opportunity while Korra is vulnerable, like a two-legged predator prowling for scraps. But he's never been a different man. Never possessed that strength to be noble and decent. Not for one instant in his existence. ]

[ Try, asks that long-forgotten voice that could be his conscience -- or pure delusion. ]

[ He's startled when Korra asks him to fetch Mai's bottle. For a moment, time reverses itself, and they're back to how they were. Before the rift. Before he'd let all that joy and closeness dribble away out of sheer carelessness. ]

[ His nerves buzz: apprehension, hope. Nodding, he heads to the kitchen. Gets Mai's bottle from the fridge, remembering, (another first) not to microwave it, but to place it briefly in a bowl of hot water. Enough to make it pleasantly cool, rather than icy enough to shock the baby's delicate mouth. ]

[ Returning, he hands the bottle to Korra. Waits, like a sentry on alert for instructions, for whatever else she might say. ]

[ Maybe she'll just tell him to get out. It's long overdue. ]

[anatural]

[She's not feeling gracious enough to thank him when he hands her the bottle, though it brings a blessed cessation to Mai's screaming. Before he can pull back, the baby reaches out and grabs his finger. Of course now she would be daddy's little girl. Of course she'd adore him, too young to remember how he left her to die. Korra's the only one who has to bear the emotional scars from her two-month long illness. Nothing in the world is fair.

But Korra resists the impulse to snatch Mai's hand away, in part because she doesn't want the baby to start fussing again... but mostly because Korra wants her to have this. To have a father, even if it's only for a few minutes.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He watches as Korra fits the nipple against the bulging wet little mouth. Mai's eyes fall contentedly half-shut as she begins to suck. Watching her, it all comes back to Hei: his stupidity, his selfishness. The sensation of his own rage at this baby, at the boiling obscene satisfaction he'd felt in walking away from her, rises up in his gut, burns the back of his eyes. Mai had nearly died. And Korra had to deal with the fallout. ]

[ He thinks about her visit to the hospital. Knows the look of disappointment and sorrow on her face, that never should've been allowed to come there. He remembers learning of Amber's betrayal, about how her machinations had erased half a continent, had erased Pai. How it made a big burning hole in his stomach that nothing could distract him from. ]

[ He wishes he could apologize. It hurts to deny Korra her rage. Hurts that she cannot scream it into his face. Direct the cold barrel of that hatred at him -- with more than empty words. It should have been you. ]

[ Then Mai grabs his finger, and his thoughts rattle to a stop like broken clockwork. ]

[ He expects Korra to jerk the baby away. But she lets the girl latch on, her fingers rosy, quinquefoliate posies against the coarse darkness of his own. She's touching the damaged hand. It registers her warmth numbly, but something pulses along its skeletal fault-lines: maybe old nerves and old memories, coming awake. ]

[ Awkwardly, Hei adjusts his grip. Squeezes the pudgy little paw gently. He wants to kiss the wiggling fingers, the way he sometimes did with Korra -- but doesn't dare. What point is there, lavishing affection on a life you'd nearly extinguished? Like a Judas kiss in reverse. ]

[ The only mercy is that Mai is too young to remember his abandonment -- or be scarred by it. ]

[anatural]

[The peace that settles over the room is almost disquieting. Nothing like Korra had imagined when Asami told her she'd invited Hei to the party. Of course, Korra realizes that a good chunk of it is simply the numbness that sets in when the first stage of grief has passed.

Her arms still feel stupidly weak from that sobbing fit (throwing that stool probably didn't help). She shifts, trying to find a way to support her arm & Mai against the couch without breaking the baby's hold on Hei, because every time she loses her grip, Mai starts to cry. Annoying, but she can't exactly tell the baby "Your daddy's an asshole who abandoned you. Don't get attached." Even if Mai was old enough to understand words, it probably wouldn't help. Korra had known what a twisted, terrible mess Hei was from the beginning, and she still got attached to him, chose to have a child by him. Love is truly the dumbest thing.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He's always believed that love and a speeding car have two things in common: tunnel vision and the promise of breakneck disaster. It's nothing smart and safe; nothing a Contractor can understand, and everything that can be used to hurt him. In loving, you paint the bullseye across your psyche; you have to trust the other person not to aim and fire. ]

[ (He understands, at last, why Amber, at her most honest, always saw affection as lying parallel with being compromised -- brainwashed. Because that kind of emotion was a pure liability that no spy could afford.) ]

[ It's too late to stop it now. If forfeiting his basic security means keeping Korra and Mai in his life, so be it. There is something dizzy, drugging, about the idea of unlearning how to define the world around him through the jargon of networks, agents, assets and threats. There is something better about the gleeful crunch of realization that comes with the thought: They never have to be part of that world at all. ]

[ Blinking, he notices Korra stir uncomfortably. Each time she jostles Mai, the baby's little hand slips from his. And each time, Mai explodes into a shrill tantrum of aggrieved abandonment. Strange, that she'd do so. He can't block it off, his shaming failure to be her father. It keeps flooding into his head -- walking away from her, his body besieged like a machine with a virus, working with a traitorous disconnection. ]

[ (So it's wrong, isn't it, to cherish the way she keeps grabbing his hand?) ]

Maybe... I could hold her?

[ The words scald his mouth. He's fully expecting Korra to glower in refusal and kick him out. ]

[anatural]

No. [Korra snaps, her mind assaulted with him images of picking Mai up and then dropping her to the ground. Or maybe just walking away, so Korra sees neither of them again. Her hands tighten reflexively around the baby.

But... her arm is tired, and Mai clearly wants him...and as long as Korra's around to keep an eagle eye on them... She sighs in defeat and holds out the now-empty bottle.]

Put this in the sink and then sit down. [That way, if he drops Mai, the fall will be less dangerous.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Her hot gaze practically radiates her mistrust. Hei can't blame her. He thinks, in a sickening burst of memory, a psychic acid reflux, of all the times he'd held Mai. Fingers twitching around her squirming mass, eyes squinting against the electric proximity of her shrieking. He remembers wondering, each time, what would happen if he let her fall. His grip was always firm; he never had any intention of loosening it. Yet each time, he was entranced by the hugeness of the responsibility he carried, and the smallness of the action that might cast a spotlight on him. A single loosening of his fingers would be enough. ]

[ Hastily, he goes to place the bottle in the kitchen, to avoid Korra's suspicious glance. He feels she's peered straight into his conscience, eavesdropping on his guilty memories. ]

[ He can't imagine how he'll recross the kitchen floor, how he'll settle on the couch opposite to Korra's. He is nearly undone by the sensory overload of all that has whipped past his startled and defeated senses: Korra, Mai, the news of Tonraq's death, the spacious livingroom redolent of happier times, the toys, the aborted birthday party, even the decorations of pink crepe-paper roses with their delicate green satin leaves dangling from the walls. Too much. ]

[ It should have been you. ]

[ Staring silently at Korra, waiting for her to hand him Mai, he wonders how someone atones for his own failure to stop living. ]

[anatural]

[You start by identifying what you actually did wrong, which isn't being alive — it's trying to die. Korra no longer trusts him because of what he did to their daughter, but it's his thwarted suicide attempt that makes her gut churn with queasy rage and resentment.

And yet despite everything, Korra passes her baby into Hei's arms, because she's an idiot. She's always been an idiot about him. He's the mistake she can't stop making.

She shifts her position so that, when she takes Mai back, she can rest her arm against the back of the couch. But she doesn't try to take the baby back just yet.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He's been caught in that bleak inner atmosphere before -- living while waiting every other minute to die. After Pai's disappearance, he'd hovered on the bare edge of breakdown -- but compared to this, that era was nothing but a poor underpainting smeared across yellowed scraps of paper. He's not made another concerted attempt -- maybe out of fear that he'd botch it again. Maybe because he can't depart without considering Korra and Mai, their existence stirring up troubling, shame-shot second thoughts. As the months went on, he'd begun to think that this must mean, in however meager a way, that even if he did not particularly want to live, neither did he want anymore to die. ]

[ Now he isn't sure. ]

[ It should have been you. ]

[ If he gets jumped by the triads again, maybe he'll let it happen. It feels like what ought to happen. ]

[ Then Korra hands him the baby. Their hands don't touch in the transfer; a fact that leaves him at once relieved and bereft. But he smiles for the pink-cheeked baby, and she smiles back. A sweet smell wafts off her: cookie crumbs and powder and milk. Carefully, he gathers her close, her warmth oddly solacing against his chest. She gurgles and clutches at the ledge of his collarbone. Her eyes are transfixing, two bright blue whorls. ]

[ Impossible to believe he'd ever felt any antipathy toward her. She's just a little girl. His little girl -- except he'd nearly killed her just to learn the lesson. ]

[ Meh, burbles Mai. Likely her way of expressing profound disinterest in his self-pity party. Get over yourself, dad. ]