love builds prisons

[anatural]

WHO: Hei & Korra
WHAT: After losing the baby, Korra sneaks out of the metal clan city to find Zaheer.

[Korra walks quickly and quietly down the corridors, using every technique she'd learned during the civil war to remain unnoticed by the guards. Snow and metal were two entirely different elements, but when you looked beyond the surface differences, the techniques for one can guide techniques for the other. She's heading for one of the isolated service doors that open up to the world outside the metal clan's city. Naga's already outside — earlier that day Korra had gone for a ride with her, and returned on foot after the guards had changed shifts. Her escape has been carefully, meticulously planned. The only person who could stop her is Hei, and he's not going to notice. He's been off in his own little dark world since she lost the baby. He doesn't see her at all.

Nobody does. Tenzin, Bolin, Mako, even Asami... They're so caught up in their pain for her that they can't see they're drowning her. Every time they say Korra, I’m so sorry, all she can think is Why? She's never wanted to be a mother. The Red Lotus is gunning for her and every other world leader. It's honestly for the best that the baby is gone. She knows there's a part of her that's grieving, but she can't feel it. That numbness and detachment frighten her, but there's no one she can talk to about it because all she'd get is more sympathy and orders to rest. Take it easy. Stay inside. Love will once again build her a prison — but she doesn't plan on giving it the chance. More than anything else, she's the Avatar, and she's not going to just hide inside a metal fortress while the world burns because she's "recovering." Even if she has to do it alone, she's going to find Zaheer and stop him.

She reaches the service door and lets out a relieved breath. Almost there.]

Comments

[mortemscintilla]

[ She never wanted to be a mother. He certainly never wanted to be a father. ]

[ Yet, in the days that pass, Hei feels unmoored from time, a shadow-puppet lurking at the fringes of his own life. He's barely aware of Korra's presence, even though Su Yin Beifong has thoughtfully placed them in suites side-by-side. He and Korra might as well be living in different countries. He's not sure how to face her, after the recent disaster. Barely wants to think about the night it happened. ]

[ Except he can recall it with pinpoint clarity. The twist of surging panic in his chest as he'd surfaced from sleep. Shaking off the remnants of a dream in which the skinned limbs of faceless children burst through the black jungle soil in South America, a million legs and fingers and toes swaying like wheat in a wind-whipped field. Sour-mouthed, sickened, he'd reached for the warm landscape of Korra's body curled across his. Then he'd smelled the blood. Staining her thighs, a huge dark butterfly spreading out on the sheets. ]

[ She'd been unconscious. ]

[ Everything that followed was a blur. It's strange -- usually Hei has an excellent memory. He can recall conversations from years ago with pinpoint accuracy. Can summon details of fleeting encounters -- words, scents, sights -- at his memory's fingertips in a heartbeat. But that night ... It's as much a distorted white blur as the moment Heaven's Gate vanished. ]

[ He can't remember. He doesn't want to. ]

[ They've all offered sympathies afterward. Every one of Korra's friends, like a fucking chorus of Pollyannas. Tenzin -- of all people -- has told him to stay close to Korra, because at this time it's important they support each other, take comfort together. Except ... he can barely bring himself to look her in the eye. Of course he's glad she's alive. Of course, even if they lost the baby, she still has his support. Of course he still loves her -- loves her without any still. ]

[ But he can't express the heaviness that settles over him later. He's never mourned someone who he's never met -- who wasn't technically alive to begin with. But it seems to involve staring aimlessly into space, while something inside him slowly contracts, iota by iota, forcing the life out of him, at least when it isn't about sitting dully in a chair, or sprawled in bed, or slumped at the dojo, feeling like his body is melting into the atmosphere. All he can think of is that he's failed even in this. He can't hold on to anyone he loves, because his very touch breeds disaster. He's half-ruined Korra by dragging her into his filth, and he knows it will torment him for years, the knowledge. That he can try to change his nature, be a better person, hope for happiness, but all that will come of it is more murder. ]

[ That night -- the first in days -- he slinks away from his room in the early dawn darkness, passing like a shadow through the streets, nearly lightless, deserted of people. It'd be easy to stagnate in his room. Twitching in fitful sleep, or staring blankly at the patterns on the walls. But no matter how low he is, he can't stand idleness. ]

[ The Red Lotus are still out there. Still after Korra. Now, more than ever, he needs to ensure they don't reach her. ]

[ So it's both ironic -- yet not -- that the first person he glimpses near the city's exit is -- ]

Korra?

[anatural]

[Seriously? This is the night Hei chooses to rejoin the world? Korra could scream with frustration. She's so close to making her escape and he's going to completely ruin it.]

What are you doing out here? [Shouldn’t you be hiding in your room?]

[mortemscintilla]

I should be asking you that. [ Hei's voice is a soft sharp bite, every line in his body pulled into a taut smoothness like a wolf scenting an ambiguous danger, possibly a threat, possibly a kill. It's barely been two weeks since the miscarriage. He hasn't been hovering at Korra's side every second -- what's the point, when her friends can comfort her better than he can? Still, he knows that she's in no shape to be sneaking around outside in the middle of -- ]

[ Fuck. ]

[ Realization scalds him. His glare hardens, even as he flexes some of the anger out of his shoulders to say more quietly, ]

I'm not letting you leave the city.

[anatural]

[And great, he's gone all protective wolf on her. They've past the point where his hard gaze frightens her; she knows it comes from a place of love. Now she's just pissed off that he's acting this way after two weeks of basically ignoring her existence.]

I'm just [looking for the bathroom] taking a walk. That's not a crime, is it?

[mortemscintilla]

[ Fucking hell. She's always been like this. Stubborn, willful. Maddening. But he understands what that sense of rebellion is rooted in -- a display of aggression worn over duty, duty covering for the eternal belief that she'll defeat her enemy, and under the belief her insecurity, kept close to the vest. On any given day, Hei's own response to this can vary widely, from irritation to empathy. ]

[ Right now, it's definitely sliding towards irritation. His gaze takes on a scalpel-like quality, as if he's trying to dig his way through her eyes and into her brain. But when he speaks, his voice is low, an appeal to her good sense. (As if that's ever worked.) ]

Korra. I know what you're trying to do. But you're in no shape to fight anyone right now.

[anatural]

[There's no appealing to Korra's good sense right now — particularly when you're Hei. Like you would know! He hasn't seen her, hasn't been there when the healers did their evaluations. He might as well be a stranger to her, and strangers have no right to boss her around.]

Like I said, I’m taking a walk. Not all of us are compulsive liars.

[mortemscintilla]

[ He wishes he could tell her -- he couldn't be around her. It wasn't because he didn't care. Wasn't because he didn't love her; if anything, in the wake of this jarring loss, he's aware that he loves her more than ever. But he's also convinced it's no good, because of what he is. He knows, if Pai was here, she'd call him an idiot. She'd remind him that the most truthful of all facts in this universe is that horrible things don't happen because of karma or fate or controlled chaos, but because sometimes events unfold in ways for which there is no explanation. Because there is only one essential truth, and it is this: things happen because they happen. Bad things. Sometimes good things. All things. With no rhyme or reason. Trying to search for meanings is just a person's way of hoping to attach significance to their lives. To believe their sufferings and triumphs were more than transient white-noise. ]

[ Except Hei can't bring himself to buy that cold brand of Contractor-rationale. The loss of this unlooked-for baby has overwhelmed him, asking as it did questions he doesn't want to dwell on. Maybe he wasn't cut out for this? For being a normal person, for wanting to bring a life into this world when whatever he loves, being loved by him, is infected, ruined. Maybe it was a good thing the baby died? And maybe ... his recent distance from Korra was his way of trying to be rid of her, too? Leaving her, drifting away hour by hour ... Except she's the one who was supposed to realize it, and up and go. ]

[ He shakes it off. Looking at Korra now, all small querulous mouth and big burning eyes, he realizes that he can't drift away. Even if he wants to. The realness of her, the gravity-well of her presence, carrying its undertones of salt and heat-current... It anchors him in place. He won't be able to escape, without dismembering some part of himself in the bargain. ]

[ Keeping the conflict off his face, he maintains a level voice. ]

Then you won't mind if this compulsive liar walks with you.

[anatural]

[Yes, she does very much mind. But she can't tell him that without admitting that they both know she's lying.]

Fine. [Hardly the most graceful response, but she doesn't need to hide the fact that she's pissed at him. Maybe if she's bitchy enough, he'll get sick of it and leave. If not, she'll just have to use the Avatar state to incapacitate him.

She stomps, opening the door with metalbending, and storms out.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He blinks as she storms out, repressing the urge to roll his eyes. Such a delicate fucking flower. Except he can't blame her for this outpouring of vitriol. He'd let her down by keeping away, by refusing to grieve with her. Even now, he feels insufficient to keep her. And he thinks that if he were in Korra's shoes, he'd be feeling the pressing need to get rid of him, too. (Yet there's that petulance, that sound and fury, that he's missed, something that cracks open a small blossom of tenderness in his chest. Yet it's impossible to ignore the fact that he's hurt her by keeping away.) ]

[ He drifts after her calmly, keeping his body-language neutral, non-threatening. Even so, he maintains a radius of space around him as if readied to draw a weapon, to turn with arms extended and lash, grab, defend -- in case she tries to make a break for it, or in case someone springs an attack on them. ]

[ A couple of beats pass, wreathed in tentative silence. Then: ]

How... how have you been feeling?

[ Physically. Emotionally. Part of him still feels sunk in the denial that the baby's dead and gone; he wonders what it's like for her, especially when she'd had to endure that brutal leavetaking, to suffer its intimate violence afterward. ]

[anatural]

Fine. Just fine. [She hates the way he asks, with the same voice Tenzin uses every time he sees her — like if his words aren't soft enough, she'll shatter into pieces. She doesn't want to be handled like a piece of china. She gets cramps sometimes still, but she stopped bleeding in her underwear days ago, and according to the healers, she doesn't have an infection. Physically, she's just fine. Emotionally... if he'd given a shit about her emotional state, he wouldn't have disappeared for two weeks.]

[mortemscintilla]

I see.

[ It is a flat, commonplace statement that makes Hei's blood thin with a sense of crippling inadequacy. But he can't seem to shape any better words. And even if he could... Well. There's nothing he could say that would make his behavior permissible, plausible, let alone a fact that she'd comprehend. It's not that Korra lacks the capacity to understand -- maybe she would, maybe she wouldn't -- but this kind of let-down isn't something you can brush off with a tepid I'm sorry. ]

[ Part of him is still amazed at how dizzied and sick and despairing the baby's loss has left him, at how desperately he'd wanted something that in fact he'd given no thought to before Korra had taken him aside and mumbled I'm pregnant. He hadn't so much as given an inkling to children or fatherhood in years and years. Once the whole irrefutable fact of who -- what -- he was had really settled into his psyche. ]

[ Once he understood, if only subconsciously, that some vital parts of him were well and truly dead. ]

[ He cuts his gaze away briefly. Inhales, and exhales. (Tells himself the ache in his chest, flowering sharper and darker each day, is exhaustion, not depression.) ]

[ Eventually, ]

I know... I should've been there with you. It was the worst possible time for me to fuck off. I just -- [ Didn't know how to face you. Didn't know how I could possibly be any help. With a dry swallow, he manages, ] I guess I was hoping it didn't really happen.

[anatural]

Well I hate to break it to you, but it did. [And you're not going to win her forgiveness with weak apologies and half-assed excuses. She knows he should've been there, that it was the worst possible time for him to fuck off. She already knows that he knows it. It changes nothing.

Just another few meters to where Naga's waiting. If Naga can take him by surprise, she can knock him unconscious and they can get away before he wakes up.

Her stomach twinges. Don’t let it be cramps. Against her will, her hand goes up to cradle the distressingly saggy flesh of her stomach. Not yet flat — just empty.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Hei's gaze, in its broad, casual scan of the territory, has already ascertained the likeliest spot Naga would be tethered. He can pick up the stress-lines of burgeoning plans on Korra's face. But when she lifts a hand to her belly, it's suddenly impossible for him to function tactically. He thinks of the first and only glimpse he'd had of her, after the miscarriage. Whey-faced, doped-drowsy, her belly, thick, empty, the wad of blood-moist padding between her legs. He remembers he'd wanted to touch her, except there'd been a cold fierce tickle in his bones -- something like a scream made flesh. ]

[ For a moment, just a moment, he'd felt that lost child in his arms, alive and whole. Looking up at him out of Korra's blue eyes. Dainty and pretty like Pai had been, wrapped in her red blanket. He could smell that milky scent that would come off the top of her head, could feel the small hand clutch at his finger. The little mouth bubbling. All that warmth, cleaving to him, needing him. Needing the non-throat-slitting-blade-whetting-battle-scheming part of him. The part that is full of humanity. ]

[ He glances away, his face set in resistant lines. But he can feel something hot and wet trying to surface behind his eyes, so unfamiliar that he has to blink rapidly. Except his vision keeps blurring. Fuck this. Fuck this. He can't remember the last time he's cried like a milksop over a commonplace tragedy, and he doesn't want to start tonight, in front of Korra. Bitterly, vehemently, he wishes it were darker, so she can't fix on his face. ]

I know.

[ It's all he can manage past the hot fist in his throat. ]

[anatural]

[The way he says that — I know — gets her to glance back at him, largely disbelieving and maybe a little concerned. He sounds like he's about to express a feeling. Except there's no way that would happen. Still, she slows her steps a little, the instinct to reach out momentarily overpowering her anger and hurt. Of everyone, Hei is the one most likely to understand how she feels: that mixture of grief and relief, the emotional detachment that allows her to function but she wishes she could bridge. It's almost as much his loss at it is hers. Her fingers twitch like she wants to take his hand —

Then Naga leaps on him.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He's as disbelieving as she is. As a rule, Hei isn't demonstrative. After the atrocities he's witnessed in his lifetime, he's learnt to coat his core in psychic teflon-plating, so even the most disastrous events can be cataloged with a tactical detachment, a layer of aloofness. But he hasn't realized that there are some emotions that operate on a register above diluted sadness. They live on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Their existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength -- a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak. ]

[ In his peripheral scope, he watches Korra's fingers twitch. He becomes aware of an ache in his jaw from the way he's clenching it. Cutting his gaze away, he lifts a brusque hand to wipe his face. Swallows and deliberately breathes in and out, in and out, trying to steady himself. A hundred jumbled thoughts are pinballing in his brain. ]

[ Which makes it easy for Naga to blindside him. ]

[ In a moment of detached disgust, Hei knows if he were himself, he'd have reacted more effectively. He'd have decimated the threat in an eyeblink. In that sense, the Polar Bear Dog is lucky. If his mind were in default mode -- the killswitch flipped off -- he'd have slit the beast's throat without hesitating. ]

[ Instead there's a hot brush of white fur. A sudden suffocating weight. He goes down like a sack of bricks, pinned by massive forepaws. ]

Ow. [ A spasm of pain jolts through him, bleeding quickly into anger. ] Dumb dog. Get off.

[anatural]

[If it had been a matter of consciously choosing to do this, Korra would have changed her mind about her original plan. But Naga had been told not to wait for a signal, and to incapacitate anyone who wasn't her. With events already in motion, she gets swept along.

She bends the water out of the flask on her hip — a decision she won't have a chance to regret — and uses it to freeze Hei's hands to the ground. Then she leaps onto Naga's back.]

Naga, go!

[mortemscintilla]

[ The ice is a white-hot shock encasing Hei's palms. Sluggish, his body seems trapped back at the moment he'd awoken to find Korra bleeding, a fly in the sticky web of retrospect. His mind too, is glued there, digging out from under the filmy, viscid swathes of denial and grief. ]

[ He watches Korra leap on Naga and take off. And he can feel his psyche responding to his unconscious wish for more time, for a few more precious seconds to decide what to do, trying to weigh his body down. Except he refuses to let it. It isn't even a decision as such, more a reflex honed by a lifetime of combat and killing. A reflex that had been delayed by his unaccustomed emotional state, but that now, as he recognizes the rashness of Korra's decision, snaps ferociously into place. ]

[ A searing volt melts the ice in a fraction of a second. It takes him a fraction more to leap to his feet, one hand already launching the spring-loaded wire under his sleeve. It tangles like a lasso around Korra's ankle. When he lets off the jag of electricity, it is a brilliant crackle -- non-lethal, but nonetheless effective. A K.O dose. ]

[ She'll be furious with him when she regains consciousness. But he can't afford to let her get away. ]

[anatural]

[Blinding, searing pain — and then darkness.

Naga growls and spins to a stop as Korra screams and she feels the girl pulled off her back by the wires. She bares her teeth, each one a pointed threat, and charges at Hei, ready to rip his throat out.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Why is his every encounter with Naga like a showdown at the OK Corral? ]

[ Hei's entire body floods with the acrid tide of instinct, his operative mind fully online again. He rolls beyond Naga's range, swiftly, cautiously -- aware of the animal's power, a single snap of those glistening teeth, the end of his world. ]

[ At an angle from the beast, he doesn't hesitate. Strikes out with a second wire, letting it snag one massive hind leg, before his eyes flash red, the electric shock piercing along the thin bridge between them and across Naga's fur and bones without prelude or delicacy. The air crackles with the scent of singed hair, and, below that, the reek of ozone. ]

[anatural]

[Congratulations, Hei. You are going to have two very pissed off ladies when they're conscious again. Naga tumbles to the ground with one last roar of pain and defiance before her consciousness goes black.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He watches the animal's enormous body drop with complete indifference. It falls with a thud across cracked earth and dry scrub, sending up a whorling waft of dust. Still breathing, and that's as far as his interest extends. Naga isn't his concern. Instead, he tucks his wires away, carefully, because if there's anyone out here -- a lurking threat -- then to be careless is to put Korra in deeper risk. ]

[ He closes the space between himself and Korra's prone body. His footfalls are soft in the burgeoning silence, his touch softer as he untangles the wire at her ankle, checks her pulse, scoops her up. He knows it was necessary to knock her out. But he can't repress a surge of remorse surfacing at the back of his throat like bile. Can't make the raw surface of his face harden. ]

I'm sorry.

[ She can't hear him, of course. But he hopes, when she awakens, that she'll give him a chance to explain himself. Hopes she'll understand that he can't let her head out alone. Not in her state. She's too precious to him to risk that way. ]

[anatural]

[The threat is not outside. The real threat lurks inside the metal city, with four figures hiding in the shadows.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ As hyper-alert as Hei is at this point, his paranoia is at a full simmer. If he hadn't been doing his own obsessive, unobtrusive scans of the area, he would have missed the intruders' lurking at the fringes entirely. ]

[ But he doesn't. ]

[ Keeping Korra bundled close, he drifts at a steady clip toward the Beifong residence, not wanting to do anything out of the ordinary, anything that might suggest he's spotted something and is preparing for it. But he is preparing, the acidic tide of adrenaline leaking in, and as a plan unspools in his mind and the preparation lets his muscles ease into a deceptively innocent shape, and as the presence of danger and the certainty of how he needs to deal with it settles into place with an awful, familiar clarity, he has to acknowledge that he might be outnumbered, overpowered, defeated. ]

[ But there's no point in speculating. He wants them to tail him to a venue they'll find sufficiently dark, or isolated, or otherwise suitable for the business at hand, so they can do what they came for and depart. ]

[ But that's the problem with dark, isolated, and otherwise suitable venues, isn't it? Like tracer rounds, they work in both directions. ]

[anatural]

[Too bad for Hei that they're not going to wait for somewhere sufficiently dark or isolated.

A tentacle of water lashes out and grabs Hei by the neck, strangling him tightly before throwing him backwards.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ The tentacle wraps around him, a smooth slippery grip, and Hei's pulse blazes and leaps as he's flung backward. The bricked surface of an adjacent wall swoops in to meet him. His shoulder slams off the surface -- but it's better than his skull, or Korra's body. Even as he was flung backward, he'd torqued his torso protectively around her, so he took the brunt of the impact. ]

[ Pinwheeling stars explode behind his eyes and abruptly his senses are filled with blood, its scent and taste, its drumming and surge. ]

[ Shaking the pain off, he tightens his grip around Korra, swinging his dizzied body away from the wall. At the same time he manages to get a grip around that watery noose around his neck, letting a sharp current arc across its length -- enough to fizzle it to steam, or hopefully, touch whoever is wielding the tentacle. ]