steps in a journey

[anatural]

WHO: Korra & Hei
WHAT: A break from suffering for a little adorable.

[Korra lies back on the roof of the airship and lets out a heavy sigh of relief. Finally, some peace and quiet. When they'd started out on their journey, Korra had thought Asami's airship was ridiculously huge for their little party, but after two months of traveling, Korra's pretty sure a continent wouldn't give her enough space from Tenzin.

Surprisingly, her mentor hadn't exploded when he found out about the pregnancy. You’re not seventeen anymore, I know that, he'd told her. You’re only a few years younger than Pema was when Jinora was born. Korra thought she'd gotten off the hook, but Tenzin's relentless fretting was even worse than his explosive temper. It got even worse after she told Mako, Bolin, and Asami; the two brothers immediately teamed up with the air bending master to nanny her to death. They hadn't stopped fussing at her until Master Katara came aboard and asked how many times they'd been pregnant. As if to make up for the boys' fussiness, Asami's been laser-focused on their mission to find new air benders. And Hei...

She sighs. Hei is Hei. The eternally confusing, mind-breaking mess that she finds herself loving more and more despite everything. She wonders how long it will take him to hunt her down.]

Comments

[mortemscintilla]

[ He watches as she applies herself with singeleminded zeal into polishing off everything on the tray. With the clear blue sphere of sky stretching out above them, and the shimmer of the water below, interwoven with the textured pleats and patches of farmland and village, like an intricate tapestry, it's easy for his otherwise sober mood to lift, the sun touching his bare arms and face, and bringing with it a heady sense of freedom. ]

[ Because here he is, away from the Syndicate, freelance, under-the-radar, with someone he wants to be with. The fact of baby still prickles under his skin, a tiny omen, but maybe in the end having it is not that much of a change from what he's been doing with Korra. He may be unsure he can even do this at all, but Hei isn't one for giving up. ]

[ After a beat, almost casually, ]

Is there any way to know, once you get bigger ... what gender it might be?

[ By 'It', he means the baby. The question, placed between them like a pair of chopsticks folded across the bowl, is unexpected. Usually he refers to the baby much more indirectly. ]

[anatural]

Hm. [It's not hesitation — he just happens to ask the question while her mouth is stuffed with beef. She waves her hand to tell him to wait, quickly chews and swallows.]

Not really. Master Katara says she has the aura of a girl, but it's not an exact science. [Still, Master Katara's read is good enough for Korra to choose pronouns. She doesn't care much about the gender either way.]

[mortemscintilla]

'Aura'?

[ He's still inclined to take these things with a pinch of salt. It reminds him of the myriad of superstitions and folklore back home. How cravings for sour food indicate it's a boy, while cravings for sweets mean it's a girl. How, if your nipples have a thickness and darkness like dates, your child will suffer an impoverished life. How you should strengthen your yin by eating pears cooked in syrup. How if you have cramps, it means the qi is stagnating around the womb, and the best cure is sugar-sprinkled daikon radish. How you should visit herbalists who check the color of your tongue, listen to the pulses on your wrist, and prescribe you pills and formulas to make sure the fetus is 'peaceful.' ]

[ It all comes back to him now, in a gust of both dry amusement and disdain. He slants an oblique glance toward her belly, then murmurs, ]

If we were back in my world, or the City, there would be ultrasounds done. Little black and white pictures to see exactly what it [ ...or possibly she... ] looks like.

[anatural]

[Don't think she's unaware of your feelings about it, Hei. She looks at him askance, but doesn't snark about it.]

We don't have anything like that. I've never heard about it, anyway.

[mortemscintilla]

[ He ignores the way her face puckers into that cute little moue that could either melt chocolate or curdle milk, depending on whether it's used for Good or Evil. Hesitates a beat, then lays a hand on her belly. The material is warmed by the sun and her flesh; her stomach feels both drumlike and soft beneath it. No sparks leaping off to transmit any unspoken messages ob the baby's gender. No preternatural radiation to alert him that there is, in fact, a third presence burgeoning inside at all. Just Korra -- with a tummy like a flattened steamed-bun. ]

[ Idly, he walks his fingers up her midriff. ]

You'd be able to see everything. Fingers. Toes. Nose. Eyelids. All baking inside you. [ With him and Korra both adding ingredients. Like a casserole, only creepier. A living casserole, with little fingers and tiny toes and hopefully no extra appendages or stunted emotions or freakish superpowers. At least he hopes not. Hell's Gate's radiation can't possibly stretch its tainted fingers here. Ideally, the baby shouldn't be a Contractor. ]

[ He's not sure how he'd handle it, if it is one. ]

[anatural]

Seriously? [Feeling a little bold, she scoots to lean back against him. They're having a good moment; might as well see if he'll indulge her in some cuddling without fucking each other senseless first.] That's amazing. You should tell Asami about it.

[mortemscintilla]

[ He seems to consider it. First with pretend-playfulness, then a more speculative seriousness. ]

Maybe I will. Show her schematics. Have her design the machine. We could apply for a patent and split the profits.

[ He flicks a cursory glance around the periphery, in case Tenzin is hovering nearby. Folds her close, then, pushing against the wariness and distance that still feathers across him sometimes like a thin glaze of ice. A needful barrier he's set up by both necessity and default, and is only just learning to dismantle. He settles her against him, his arms and legs folding themselves around her like they're two cats, paws tucked close. Warm collapsible luggage. ]

[ For a moment he stares down at her like she's a feline mirror, half-lidded eyes to bright blue ones in some meaningful silent dialogue. ]

[ At beat, then, in a rare moment of honesty, ]

Ultrasound or not... I hope the baby's more like you than me.

[anatural]

[Korra sighs happily as she settles her weight more solidly against him. It'd be nice if he really did talk to Asami about it. Not just because it would be really cool to have a picture of the baby, but because it would (maybe) help him integrate more with her friends. She knows he feels isolated around them, like the odd man out, but it's a divide she has no idea how to breech. And for too long, it was a divide she was content to leave, because she liked having him all to herself, her own secret safe harbor when everything that should have felt familiar was alien and strange. She's over that now, mostly, and becoming mildly dissatisfied with feeling like she's living a double life. She doesn't need them all to like each other, but she wants everyone to feel like a team, and not just a group of people she's tenuously holding together.

The honest admission makes her heart flutter, though she has no idea how to respond. Me too comes perilously close to rolling off her tongue, but even to Hei that seems a little mean to say. Yet as much as she loves him, there's very little about him that she'd want to inflict on her offspring.]

I think... she's going to be like nobody else. [And not just because everybody's different. The child of a young Avatar, whose father is from a completely different world, born in the midst of global revolution... it's a unique mold.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ It's true. Around her friends, he's a fish out of water. Hell, he's still getting accustomed to the idea of having actual allies. (Yin and Mao might be the closest thing he has to those here -- what a fucking novel idea -- but trust is still a whole other ballgame.) ]

[ And Korra's team hovers between two uneasy lines: not enemies, not allies, not other snakes in the grass like he views rival Contractors, but not assets he can exploit either. Being around them makes him acutely aware that, for all the progress he's made with Korra, he still doesn't know how to be a real person: he's forgotten how to relate to other people without 'Li's cookie-cutter persona to act as a shield and a bridge. He's found the mask useful in the past; doubts he'd have gone even this far without it. He's been separated from people his own age too long, assumed a solitary post within the confines of his own mind. Social interaction might as well be an expedition to the North Pole. ]

[ Holding Korra close now, he feels himself thrumming with deep energies he can't distinguish from thrill or anxiety. Circling one arm around her, a heavy comfortable sling, he combs his fingers through her hair with the other. Almost a fraternal vigor, but his palm lingers, cupping the side of her face, the pad of his thumb tracing the soft pillow of her lower-lip. ]

[ Surreal, every single time, to imagine there's something alive inside her. It makes him think of matryoshka Dolls, vibrant layers folded within vibrant layers. But a baby is so much more than that. It (she?) could make both their ordeal in the City, their struggles toward and against each other, mean something. Make his mystifying connection to this young woman into something more than the animal instinct to fight and fuck and huddle together in fear. ]

[ Almost to dispel the moment of heavy emotion, he says, wryly, ]

And, hopefully, beautiful like her mom and smart like her dad. [ A beat. ] Or is it the other way around?

[anatural]

Mmm. [She's not paying attention. His words remind her of something else that's been in her thoughts.] I wonder if she'll be a bender... [Especially now, no one really understands how bending gets passed down. At one point in history it had seemed geographical, but then waterbenders were discovered in the swamps of the earth kingdom. Non-benders from the earth kingdom moved to fire nation territory and gave birth to benders. The sudden rise of airbenders from nowhere only further muddles an already confusing topic.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He's long since suspected that bending -- like a Contractor's abilities -- share a crux of energy. They exist in an electric world. Its energy runs through the veins of everyone. His energy signature -- singular to him alone. Korra's too -- a unique marker. Billions of beings, each with their own energy signature as distinctive as a fingerprint. All aware of one another's energy and reacting to it intuitively and without conscious thought. Is someone's energy strong, is it weak? Does an atmosphere of a particular place drain them, does it replenish them? ]

[ Vital energy flows sluggishly in most people. They walk and their footprints leave uneven imprints in the dust. They list. They are out of balance. But there are those in whom the flow of energy is coherent; their biophoton emissions are seamless and the periodic rhythms stable. He's always suspected those anomalies -- here, in his world -- are the ones most susceptible to acquiring the gift of bending, or being cursed with a Contractor's abilities. And after Harmonic Convergence, there are likely build-ups in the movements of people's qi, a wavelike flow in the world around them. It's no wonder all these airbenders are popping up out of nowhere. ]

[ He keeps these speculations to himself. Rests his chin against Korra's shoulder, feeling the warm ebb and flow of her breathing thrum through her torso, and says, ]

She probably will be. The question is, what kind.

[anatural]

[He rests his chin on her shoulder, and she leans so that her head is against his.]

Wouldn't it be crazy if she's an airbender?

[mortemscintilla]

[ The settled weight of her against him is like a blanket of warmth. Hei tightens his arms and, after a heartbeat's hesitation, kisses her temple. In his peripheral vision, he can see one of the porthole windows at the quaterdeck darken, and catches a glimpse of the white disk of what looks like Tenzin's concerned face. Ordinarily that'd be enough to dispel the mood, to let his arms slip off Korra. But right now ... who the hell cares? Korra's not the holy Madonna. That whelp didn't end up in her belly via immaculate conception. ]

[ Lightly, he butts his head against hers, warm and heavy and ticklish-soft as a dark cat resting on his shoulder. ]

[ Teasingly, ]

Not too crazy. But if she's a firebender or an earthbender, I'd want a paternity test.

[anatural]

[She snorts and elbows him affectionately but none too gently.]

Don't even joke about that.

[She notices Tenzin too, and deliberately ignores him. If he wants to interrupt the moment, he'll have to come out.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Hei watches the blinds at the porthole twitch, then flip shut. Tenzin seems to have gone. Relaxing a degree, he folds Korra closer. His right hand has fanned, as if of its own volition, across her belly. Staring at his starfished fingers, Hei thinks, bleakly, I didn't invite you into our lives. You're trouble, and you're going to change everything. I like a smooth-limbed woman when I wake up in the morning, not a bloated harpy with moodswings and cramps, and that's what you'll turn her into. You'll distract her and weaken her but she'll still have no choice but to love you. I'll have no choice except try to do the same. Can't you see how messed-up that is? Can't I? ]

[ Because the kicker is ... I want to keep you as much as she does. ]

[ In his thoughts there is cold certainty. In his arms is just ... reality. Real, thrumming, hotly vibrant, an uncertainty, this miraculous and touchable Korra Plus ProtoTyke, her hair strung with motes of sunlight and dust, flesh exuding spicy sweat and temperament, the folds of her blouse across her belly like crumpled butterflies. ]

[ A beat, then two, before he speaks quietly, his gaze dipped, ]

When I was younger, I used to think a girl wasn't worth anything if she wasn't a bundle of trouble. If she didn't cost me something. [ Amber certainly had. And Pai cost him more than he'd had in his capacity to give. A pause, an exhale. ] I don't know ... what this baby will cost us. In any sense. But I don't want to let you down, either. I can't go on being that person who keeps hurting someone who cares for them, over and over. I can't be that person.

[anatural]

[Funny. I used to be the same. Isn't she still? Would she continue to love Hei like she does if he suddenly got easy to love? She doesn't know. She doesn't think about it. He keeps talking, and she rests her hand on his arm and squeezes reassuringly. As close as they've gotten, it's still a surprise and a thrill when he opens up to her without a screaming fight preceding it.]

We can do this. I know it's not going to be easy, but look at what we've already done. And we've got people on our side. We've got this.

[mortemscintilla]

[ It's still not easy for him to open up, not when there's nothing to be gained from it.. Not when he still views the world through the red divides of that killer, born in South America and propelled by bloodshed and warfare into ruthless maturity, who doesn't quite fit into a civilized world. Doesn't know how to have an exchange where the motive isn't to get the advantage somehow. Where honesty isn't the cover for a lie. ]

[ But he finds himself wanting to give her that honesty, because it will be something real, a level of truth most go their entire lives without confronting, always content to hide behind their social masks and deep-seated delusions. Her words suffuse him with something soft, buoyant, that makes him think of marshmallows shaped like the dumb sweet dreams of children, ready to be stabbed with sticks. ]

I hope so.

[ He doesn't mean it dubiously or dryly -- he means it genuinely, a plain kind of acknowledgement. Because he's terrified and skeptical and blindsided, but he also knows all there is to know about having something in your life you'll die for. Holding Korra against him, he reminds himself over and over he's lucky to share any aspect of this girl's life, no matter how big or small. And a quieter, more logical voice reminds him that if this all goes smash, at least he'll walk away knowing that, for at least a brief moment in time, he was happier than he ever deserved to be. ]