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]

[ The day he'd left Mai alone was no accident. But it wasn't exactly premeditated, either. ]

[ He remembered coming home from work, his whole body lose with a bone-deep exhaustion; it felt like anyone could roll him up into a carpet and haul him over their shoulders. When he neared the Beach House, the sound of the baby's screaming had been leaking through the four walls like a muted fire siren. He dimly recalled glancing at his neighbors'distant houses on either side; there seemed no sign of life. Perhaps there were people in those houses; perhaps not. Perhaps there were even people with babies. The curtains were drawn, opaque as the ozone layer separating earth from space. ]

[ That's how he'd felt. Immensely distant, sunk down into a bubble of tiredness, stillness. ]

[ Inside the house, with Korra off on Avatar-related duties, the screaming had been unbearable. But of course it would be; here were different acoustic principles operating on this side of the threshold. He remembered Mai in his arms, her whole body tight and red as a sausage from shrieking, and smelling of sewage. It hadn't been her normal bad smell, but something aggressively more putrid. Hei had begun to undress her, but the screaming pierced his brain like a red-hot skewer. The room seemed to be closing in around him, as if her crying were sealing off every iota of space. ]

[ Breathing slowly, he'd refastened the press-studs on Mai's jumpsuit, sealing up the fresh diaper while he considered what to do. He could imagine picking up the screaming girl and holding her high above his head. Could imagine staring up at her dark howling face and her fat red limbs dangling so close to his face. ]

[ Could imagine, with all his strength, throwing her across the room, bouncing her off the wall with a plasticine thud. ]

[ Instead he'd left Mai in her cot, hearing her rising cries and breaking into a run to evade that sound and everything it meant. ]

[ When he'd been jumped later -- at a trash-strewn lot in the outskirts of the city slums, sewage and garbage baking in the heat -- the triads had caught him taking chances. Being careless. Out without his wires or blades, shit-faced at three in the humid morning. He'd been doing that more and more as the days wore on -- playing chicken with himself in high-risk zones, skating that precariously thin line between daredevilry and assisted suicide. ]

[ These triad hitmen were good -- which almost made a pleasant change. Even at his fittest, the battle would be a challenge for him to carry out unscathed. He'd fought them for a solid three hours, but they were like a hailstorm -- ten, twelve, fifteen -- and when they managed to yank him by degrees into a shit-crusted alleyway, the stench of rotting durian piercing his sinuses, he'd accepted that he'd run out of luck. ]

[ He'd probably be screwed if Mako and Bei Fong hadn't shown up. He doesn't remember much -- he'd been shocky. When he wakes up, he is laid out on a squishy white bed with his right wrist elevated in a pillowy contraption whose many braces, straps, pulleys and lacings drive a spike of cottony dread into him. Two bags of fluid hang on a metal pole and drip-drip-drip down a tube into a needle poked into his other arm. ]

[ A fractured hand -- but he isn't sure how bad. The cast covers up the wreckage, but the fingers poking from the fiberglass are dark and swollen to twice their size: they have a rotten shine to them, like the skin of a fruit that's about to split apart and leak its insides. Break a bone in your hand and it never heals right, he remembers Maxley telling him once. Fracture a tarsus and the hairline is there to stay -- like a crack in granite under the x-ray. ]

[ Mai. Korra. That is his first thought. His second, a druggy singsong is: Can I still use this hand in a fight? ]

[ When Korra arrives, fantastically colorful in the gray monochrome of the room, the relief that crashes through him is the best sensation he's had in hours. ]

[ Until the slap, anyway. ]

[ The blow nearly spins him out of the bed, his face hot and shocked. But he bites his gasp back and thinks, Good, you shit. ]

[anatural]

[He doesn't say anything. He doesn't fight back. It's yet more proof that he got into this shape deliberately, that he's given up and just wants to die. All because they have a baby — a baby he agreed to. She didn't force him into this; she gave him the choice.]

What were you THINKING?! [She grabs his hospital gown and lifts him up, not caring whether it disturbs any of his injuries. In fact, she hopes it does. She hopes it fucking hurts. She wants nothing more right now than to beat the crap out of him.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ What was he thinking? He isn't sure. All his life, he's never reached the point of wanting death above all else; he merely saw that time on the near horizon, as he swooped dizzily forward through the slipstream of his life; he might swerve and miss it, or he might gratefully head straight at it. Yet during that fight ... ]

[ It hits him then, like a shiruken in the chest -- he is back in that fetid dark alleyway, being forced against the smeary wall, pinned, about to be slaughtered. Death had been so close -- so close. All the air -- all the power and will -- had dissolved from him; he'd been sure it was the end, and he'd melted into a vacuum, wanting nothing else. And it was all right. ]

[ Then it didn't happen. ]

[ Hei shudders -- but he's not sure if it's a psychic paroxysm or something more visceral. The way she's yanked him up tugs at the tubing and needles across his arms. His face and body is a purpling cluster of bruises. The inner corners of both eyes are black, his nose and lip shadowed in welts. Yet the way he eyes her is like a wild animal. A misshapen dirty beast -- that can either lash out with claws and fangs, or creep into a burrow and die. ]

[ When he speaks, his voice is hollow, almost disinterested. A terrifying caricature of his usual monotone. ]

It was ... a mistake.

[ Wanting to leave? Having a baby? He's not sure. He is tired, beyond exhausted, too tired to think, unwilling to think. All his thinking never gets him anywhere. The vein in his neck throbs and jumps. He touches it stiffly with his undamaged hand, feels the welt that loops around the skin in a ragged necklace. He's nothing but one big open wound. ]

DAMN YOU LACK OF ICONS

[anatural]

A MISTAKE. [Talk about understatement of the fucking century. For the first time in over a decade, Korra doesn't care about the inhuman look in his eyes; it stirs in her neither pity nor fear. The impulse she always feels to reach out and soothe him is smothered under the weight of her anger.]

Mai almost died. [If she'd gotten held up in the city, if the negotiations hadn't gone so easily, if she'd been just five minutes later... It's too horrifying to contemplate.] She's been a hospital the entire time you've been gone. I should be there right now. [She doesn't have to say that she would be, if he hadn't been stupid enough to land himself in the hospital. A part of her wants to say "fuck it" and leave, the same part of her that piled all his clothes in the front yard, set them on fire, and then told Naga to piss on them. But she's too angry to just give up like that. She needs to see him as broken as she feels. She grabs the hand touching his neck and twists it hard.] Are you listening?

;.;

[mortemscintilla]

[ He is silent -- mostly because she is bending his hand back so hard towards his wrist that all he can do was work his mouth in a soundless plea to be released. That she is right to be so furious -- absolutely and irrefutably right -- only piles on his self-loathing. Mai almost died. That is bad, that is so bad, because Korra is in such pain, and yet she seems so far away, and even if he puts his arms around her he won't be able to feel what she feels because he doesn't have it in him. ]

[ Maybe it's true. Maybe he really doesn't have any love in him. ]

[ Maybe he once did, but he'd let himself lose the thread of it, let it get submerged and trampled on, dissolved, because too much of him is hard inside, and it is better often, just being hard all over. At least ... at least that's what he's always told himself. He doesn't know anymore. He used to be a boy who loved deeply, and what had happened to that? ]

[ The bandage on his throat is wet. ]

[ Not catching her eyes, he says, in that same abraded half-tone, ]

You should be with Mai.

[ Is there even a comparison? Better for her to be with that little morsel of sweetness she'd grown in her womb -- not this waste of oxygen, foul and riddled with guilt, who has ruined her life for too long already. ]

[anatural]

You should be with Mai. You should have been with her when she first got sick!

[She drops his wrist, in part because she'd probably break it if she held on any longer, and in larger part because she wants him to look her in the eyes. She grabs his chin, nails digging into the bruised flesh, and forces him to at least face her, even if his eyes look away.

And it guts her all over again, seeing him bruised, beaten, broken.]

Do you hate me that much? [It's not an entirely rational question, but it's not without merit. He could have waited until she got home and said "I can't do this anymore." He could have called Asami or Pema or Bolin and had them come to watch Mai, or dropped her off himself on his way out. She can think of dozens of things he could have done differently, if his only problem was not wanting to deal with fatherhood. Just abandoning Mai like he did, then trying to get himself killed... It's like he wants her to suffer, some sick twisted punishment for her wanting to have this baby. How angry he must be, if this is how he chooses to lash out.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He doesn't meet her hot gaze full-on. He just gives her an oblique look out of glistening, red-edged eyes. His aches are mild at best; whatever is dripping into his veins spares him the full extent of the agony. ]

[ At least the physical type. ]

[ Do you hate me that much? That gets him in the ribs. His face stays smoothed of expression -- a corpse or a statue -- but something sparks in his eyes. For a heartbeat he is as furious as she is. A fantasy of shoving her off him to fly across the room swims through his mind. In the next breath it is subsumed by a sharp soul-sickness, buried down so far he wasn't even aware of it until now, that surges up at the thought of a full-out battle with her. He doesn't want to win it -- doesn't even want to hurt her. But he wouldn't mind it if she trounced him past the point of no return. ]

[ The sensation afterwards would be good -- like the kind of aching pleasure that comes from worrying at a sore tooth. ]

[ Because, fuck -- he'd never meant to hurt her like this. At the same time he can hardly believe that he'd ever had the nerve to be her lover, to come to her world as if he deserved it, as if what he was had any merit. The last few years -- hell, everything since the stars scattered like dustmotes from the sky -- is a mania, now exploding into tiny fragments of foul trash. ]

[ Unsteadily, ]

I could never hate you. But -- [ He swallows. His throat makes a dry click. ] It's just no good, because of what I am.

[anatural]

Don't even start with that. [It's his favorite excuse, because of what I am. Hearing it yet again makes her feel like something is clawing at her spine. Her fingers tighten reflexively and she has to swallow back bile.]

I'm sick of your excuses. You don't get to escape the consequences because you're "a monster." You made a choice. You chose to leave our daughter. [You chose to leave me.]

[mortemscintilla]

You need to think it's excuses, then think it.

[ He is amazed to hear how calm he sounds, as the throbbing in his broken hand steps up, the sting shooting up his whole arm. But it's nothing to the anguish crushing at his chest, like a skewer steeped in acid and shoved inside him -- mind and body both. He wishes it wasn't so hard. Wishes he wasn't so hard. Frozen and dried up inside. This thing with Mai should bring him and Korra together, not -- ]

[ There is no together when there's nothing to be getting on with. ]

[ He can't feel what he can't feel. Ever since Mai's birth, he's been trying to shrug his displacement off, but all that happens is he drifts further and further from her. From Korra. He has everything going perfectly for him -- shiny new world, beautiful girl, bouncy baby. Yet all he feels is empty. And frightened. Everytime he looks at the little mass of flesh that's his, he can't feel anything. His daughter, his baby, his little dumpling, his one and only: he feels nothing for her. No wonder, no joy, no happiness. Nothing. His head is full of white noise -- the kind of dead static that makes you think you're going insane. ]

[ It's sick. He knows that. He's done so many despicable things. So much to be ashamed of. But this isn't something he's done. This is him. Not an act but an identity. He's always tried to convince himself he's not shaped by his past. That he's survived it unscathed, with his humanity left intact. ]

[ It's a lie. The baby has given him away completely. ]

[anatural]

[You condescending piece of -- Korra has never been so close to actually hating him. Not even back in the City, when he'd threatened her friends and then acted like a jerk after sleeping with her. She hadn't loved him enough then to feel the maelstrom of anger and disappointment and heartache that's just a hairbreadth away from genuine hatred. She could kill him right now. One of the only things stopping her is she knows he wants her to.

She drops her hand and backs away, stitching herself back together with cold fury until she's somewhere safe to fall apart.]

When you get out of here, don't come back.

[She slams the door behind her hard enough to break it from its hinges. She doesn't care.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ There's a chilling duality to this, Hei knows; how they fell together versus the now, the falling apart. He watches Korra leave, trailing behind an icy cloud of rage. But the storm is evanescent; the anger is just the blinding superstructure keeping her together, until she finds somewhere to fall apart. He's not surprised to watch her go, but he is surprised by the way something in him constricts so red dots dance before his eyes. ]

[ His throat knots, and a part of him thinks, It's better this way. Better if you go on with your life. Forget about me. ]

[ She slams the door behind her, and he doesn't look surprised, doesn't look like a man whose intentions have been misunderstood, who has been holding something back for a glad surprise. His expression stays blank and clear-eyed -- even as a dizzy dip in his chest reminds him to breathe. ]

[ When he falls back against the pillows, inhaling jerkily, she is gone. ]

TIME SKIP - A FEW MONTHS OF EMONESS AND A NOVEL-SIZE TAG LATER

[mortemscintilla]

[ He's seen men cry after breaking their hand in a fight. Leather-skinned prizefighters and steely-eyed triad assassins slumped on a corner stool with tears squirting out their eyes. It's not quite the pain, he understands now -- though the anticipation of pain is there: fingers swelling into freakish balloons, the electric grind of bone on bone. ]

[ It's the frustration that makes them cry. ]

[ In Hei's trade, survival is all about minimizing weakness. Crappy endurance? Roadwork. Sloppy footwork? Skip rope. Weak gut? A thousand stomach crunches daily. But a fighter with bad hands can't do a thing about it, aside from learning a little about wrapping brittle bones. So they cry -- because it's a weakness there's not a fucking thing they can do for and it will commit them to the second tier on the ladder. One step below the street-sweepers who dispose bodies, the low-level honeytraps and bruisers who handle the dirty work. ]

[ Hei had a strong right hand -- knuckles as solid as nutcrackers, fingers as deft as a cardsharp. But now his supple hand is replaced with a sort of claw, disobedient, stupid. The bones haven't healed right. They always throb on cold evenings, and as winter creeps in, they act up day and night. The doctors tell him to be patient: proper physical therapy will restore mobility to his fingers and wrist. ]

[ In the meantime, he's left with a grubby stub that can't wield either switchblades or chopsticks. ]

[ (Maybe it's karmic -- for the victims whose fingers he'd snapped like twigs in his heyday?) ]

[ He and Korra might as well be cycling around in different orbits. He's dropped well down from her sphere in the months after they'd parted, and never sees her or anyone she knows -- except Asami. He'd planned to drop out of his work for Future Industries -- but the stubborn woman had kept him on, sending him to the busy atelier of their head tech. The older man doesn't so much implement his inventions as art direct them. Hei does a lot of that work, which is complex and absorbing, until as he feels, day by day, the deftness return to his hand. ]

[ Sometimes, lying on his lumpy futon on the floor of the too-small, too-hot, too-roach-ridden apartment, where every morning he has to jockey with two other men for use of the miniscule hallway bathroom, he dreams of wielding his knives the way he used to -- expelling energy and deadly skill in a fluid line. His dreams about Mai and Korra are less frequent, which he supposes is a good thing. But in waking hours, they twist into a knot in his chest, a sensation that aches in a different way. He's lost sight of what is important to him. Lost his place, as surely as he's lost himself. ]

[ Living on tea, lentil soup and greasy take-out -- there is no kitchen for home-prepped meals -- he never really sleeps well, and knows he's lost ground on the looks front. But his life is on a fairly even keel now, after the six months it took to scrape himself together. Work in the mornings: a wearying blur of blue schematics and ink and grease and noise that is louder than ignorable, legally below deafening, its clanks and thuds and hisses disguised by an aural fog of synthetic music from an industrial-strength radio. Occasionally his boss sings along to one of the tunes if it strikes him as sufficiently symbolic of some event in his life. ]

[ Hei never sings. One off-key monstrosity in the room is plenty. ]

[ In the evenings, he heads to a dojo at the edges of the city. Not a glamorous venue: it is a ground-level fighting club, a dank subterranean chamber where men gather to study the edicts of hurt. Alone or sparring with a partner, Hei lets his feet flicker across a vulcanized floormat, body circling to the left, feinting, ducking away, back to the right. The squeak of his feet on the rubber and his breath coming into an even rhythm. His right hand's bones feel like crockery shards in a muslin bag. You get one hard shot before they shatter. But the rest of him is quick -- and he trains daily to be so quick he could fight in a rainstorm and stay bone dry. ]

[ Late in the night, he drinks steadily, his post-fight mellowness shading into something else: a quiet rage that burns like poison. But even then, it is himself he burns, more than anyone else, and when the burn reaches a certain temperature, he goes home to slump fully-clothed on the futon, the apartment's airless heat robbing him of everything but the need for sleep. ]

[ Asami -- that pindot of disquiet in her eyes -- tries to salvage him. Maybe for Korra's sake. Maybe because she sees something of her father and herself in that shambles between him and Mai. He isn't sure. Stumbling back from the bar he'll find AA schedules taped to the door, twelve-step brochures in the mailbox. No way he can hack detox or the nuthatch, glimpsing all his victims in those damn Rorschach inkblots. He truly considers gathering up the money he's ratholed and hightailing it to the Fire Nation. ]

[ Until Miss Sato hires a pair of thugs to drag him -- an alcohol-sodden wreck -- to her family doctor. Hei is forced to sleepwalk through counseling sessions, to listen to bullshit he'd prefer to slide off the surface of his consciousness altogether. He picks up a few insights, but the business leaves him unsettled afterwards. Each time, returning from 'therapy', he takes the longest, hottest shower he can stand, then soaks in an equally scalding bath until the water begins to cool. It relaxes his body, but his mind won't follow suit. Images of Mai, of Korra, keep floating through his skull. ]

[ What does it say about him -- that he's fallen back into his old ways, despite having a child? After all, it was Korra he'd remade himself for, Korra who had grown to be his shining star. But Mai would've gave him what Korra couldn't: innocence. Hers, and therefore, his own. ]

[ It's his own fault. He'd cheated himself. Stage-managed, anyhow, the spectacular failure of his happiness. ]

[ Weeks pass, and one evening, Asami calls to tell him it's nearly Mai's birthday. There will be a party, she says. You have to come. ]

[ What for? Hei wants to ask. Yet, on autopilot, he gets up and goes. Knocks on the Beach House's door, even, like a regular person, with nothing on him but the clothes on his back and a parcel wrapped in plain brown paper. ]

[ (First time for everything?) ]

[anatural]

[Korra almost cancels the party altogether, she's so furious. Not just at Asami, who invited Hei behind her back. Not just Mako and Bolin, who harped about the importance of family and how she should at least let Mai see her dad on her birthday. No, while she's angry and hurt at their remarkable lack of sympathy, she gets where they're coming from: the broken families that make them hate seeing another family fall apart.

But TENZIN. She had at least expected Tenzin to support her, if for no other reason than he never liked Hei and had nearly broken the Airbender promise of pacifism when Hei had almost killed Mai. But instead of agreeing with her, he had spouted some bullshit about forgiveness and Aang & Zuko. She's stopped speaking to him entirely.

Asami is giving directions to the decorators and the bending brothers are doing some last-minute frosting on the cupcakes when Korra gets the call.

Your father died in a hunting accident. You need to come home.

She doesn't understand how that happened. He and her mother were supposed to be traveling down here for Mai's birthday; he should have been on a skybison, not losing against an arctic seal.

She doesn't remember canceling the party and ordering everyone to leave, though she vaguely recalls some resistance from her friends. But somehow eventually she's alone with Mai, in the half-decorated house she's been thinking of moving out of. Maybe this is a sign.

She needs to pack. She needs to make arrangements to get to the South Pole. Instead, she sits in the blessed silence and cradles Mai. Wondering dimly when the tears will come.

When she goes to answer the front door, it's with a surreal sense of detachment. Mai's warm weight is the only thing anchoring her to reality. She's too detached to slam the door shut in Hei's face.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ The evening is wintry yet unclouded. The sunshine feels like a bright, dream-buttery radiance on Hei's skin -- weightless yet holding him fast. During his brief trip to the Beach House by subway, he'd listened to music and paged through a big stack of magazines and worked on some plans for the advanced weaponry workshop Asami was prodding him to start, and just generally willed himself to stay in the moment. ]

[ So he isn't really prepped for the heart-juddering shock of seeing Korra again -- unchanged, in the flesh. She stands at the door, and he waits for his spaciness to recede, his whole body rigid, unbreathing. In her arms, Mai is a solid, big-eyed bundle. Staring at her, Hei shuffles the mental snapshots of her, looking for what he'd been so sure of seeing, tortuous memory of his failure clinging to her like the illustrations of è gui in those ancient ink scrolls. But she is just a baby. A blue-eyed, round-cheeked baby and nothing else whatever. ]

[ Peering up at him with her bright, interested eyes, she clamors and waves her arms, almost in recognition. Meeeeh! The gleeful, piping cry goes through him like a red-hot lance. ]

[ Hei swallows, forcing himself to count to ten, then glances back at Korra. She looks as beautiful as ever -- something that has nothing to do with the fact that all he's seen otherwise are the pitted faces of fighters in dojos, or the bland, grease-smudged mugs of the mechanics at his workplace. Yet there is a peculiar pale stillness in her features. Like she's been dipped in ice. Like she's frozen in shock. ]

[ Hei catches a glimpse of the empty house behind her. The colorful streamers and half-done decorations. Belatedly -- like a pebble colliding off his spine -- he realizes something has happened. ]

...Korra...

[ It's shaped into a wary-edged question. ]

[anatural]

[She finds her voice once he's broken the silence.]

The party's been canceled.

[Mai is still clamoring in her arms, reaching out for Hei. Korra tries to shush her, but she's too numb to remember how. Baaa! Baaa! The baby is either imitating a koala sheep, or she's just spoken her first word: Dad!

Nothing is fair.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Canceled? Startled by her flat inflection, he nearly asks if it's something to do with him. Maybe she doesn't want him here. Maybe this was a huge mistake -- one that will leave him twice as scooped out and heartbroken afterward. But that is the height of self-absorption. This has nothing to do with him. Something else has happened. Something calamitous. ]

[ His heart, so buoyed by the sight of her and Mai, clenches with dread. ]

[ He parts his lips to speak. Then Mai squirms, her hands two tiny things, pudgy and pink as beached starfish. Baa baa! Her voice, high and chiming though it is, is Korra's exactly, but softer and less finely modulated -- still musical, but more a cheerful little bell than an oboe d'amore. Blinking, Hei stares at her, those little words lighting up in his miswired brain -- sparkage and grating gears. He doesn't know if it's her first word, or, if in his absence, she's already said everything from Cat to Bolin to goddamn Naga. ]

[ It doesn't matter. She's talking at him. Maybe she even recognizes him. Stupid, yeah -- but he still holds a belief in the possibility. ]

[ Carefully -- still expecting Korra to cringe and duck indoors, or for the whole scene to dissolve between his fingers, liquid dreams pooling down the brainpan -- he reaches out for Mai. Giggling, she furls her fat little fingers around the edge of his sleeve. Entranced, a little dazed, Hei could watch her for hours. ]

[ But Korra's whole manner disturbs him. ]

...Has something happened?

[anatural]

[Korra tenses when Hei reaches for Mai. Not that she expects that he'll do anything directly to harm the baby — certainly not while she's right there — but the last time he was responsible for Mai, she nearly died. This is not something easily forgotten or forgiven. But he doesn't try to take Mai, which is the only reason she lets the baby play with his sleeve.]

I need to go home. [That's all she can bring herself to say. She doesn't owe him the details... and honestly, if she tried to give them, she's pretty sure whatever's keeping her from sobbing uncontrollably would break.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Korra's eyes are spacey and filmed, but he senses the anxiety humming off her. He can't blame her. Last time he'd been near Mai, he'd nearly killed her. By pure miserable carelessness, which is somehow worse than cruel deliberation. Peace has not come to him in these months apart from her, but other insights have. Gradually, via the musings just before and after sleep, he's crept back over it all, seeing it differently. Korra's hopeful efforts, his own eerie detachment. What she'd thought they were doing together, the goodness she'd thought Hei was capable of. Couldn't blame her for feeling betrayed, ill-used. He'd gone about everything all wrong. Yet Korra was kinder through it all than most other people would be. ]

[ I need to go home, she says. ]

[ Hei blinks, feeling disquiet and confusion creep slowly but surely inside. He's not so idiotic as to believe she's packing up and returning to the South Pole to escape him. That's impossible. Hei himself is insufficient to keep her -- but also to drive her off. Korra's duties bind her to Republic City: she stays deep and grounded, a stolid tree in one spot. He can't imagine why she'd want to uproot herself -- all at once. ]

[ Except he can. ]

[ Mai continues fondling his sleeve. Gently, Hei slips it away from her grasp. She looks sad at the detachment, and he feels sad too, but his eyes have sharpened as they fix on Korra, steady and speculative. ]

Has something happened to your parents? To Katara?

[anatural]

[She stiffens when he says Your parents? But she forces herself to hold it together. As long as she doesn't have to actually say the words, she can hold it together.]

Like I said, the party's cancelled. Thanks for coming.

[She steps back to close the door, but traitorous Mai starts wailing, and Korra's force to turn her attention to soothing her. Trying to, at least.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ It's Hei's hand that is damaged, not his mind. Something as happened. It's there in the way she stiffens, a throttled wildness leaking into the air around her. It's there in her hasty retreat, curbed only by Mai, who bursts into tears. Hei's skull resounds with that familiar sound. It used to scrape his nerves raw: as if his brain was being tenderized by a thousand hammer blows delivered with instinctive accuracy and force by her furious little vocal cords. Other times it was just background noise, like traffic passing outside a window -- unimportant and ignorable. ]

[ Now, her crying goes through him in a thick, bright-red current of pain. The little girl's face is seeping tears; they move slowly down her red-mottled cheeks, her breath coming a little more quickly than usual, coming with a certain shakiness to it, a trembling and hesitation that bubbles over into sobs. ]

[ Against his will, he edges closer. ]

Could I -- stay a bit? Just to see --

[ He says the name, Mai, which has not passed his lips in many many months, and it seems to burn his mouth. She ought to have nothing to do with him, this baby, neither should Korra; he'd thrust them away from his toxic aerie. ]

[ Yet, maybe for the first time in ages, he understands all of this is real. This child is his. He is her father. ]

[anatural]

[She can see Bolin's puppy eyes, Asami's gently pleading expression, the constipated face Mako makes when he tells her something she doesn't want to hear. Let him stay. For Mai.

It makes her blood boil.]

Since when do you care? A year later and now you give a shit?

[Mai flails her arms, getting increasingly fussy in response to Korra's obvious anger.]

You need to leave. You're upsetting the baby.

[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.]