Chapter Text
The room is filled with darkness. Korra looks around the room, but there’s nothing else there until the sound of someone walking close catches Korra’s attention. These footsteps are familiar. Her chest feels heavy, hands appear from the surrounding darkness, pulling Korra into the void behind. The figure continues to walk closer to Korra.
“Don’t come closer! Go away!” she shouts as the void starts swallowing her in. Korra stretches herself out from the grabbing hands, but it’s not working. The hands keep on multiplying the more she struggles. Her eyes start to bleed causing the void to get stronger.
“It’s going to be fine, Korra” Asami assures her as the woman walks closer and closer. “I’m not going to let it take you. Not this time”, her fiancee continues to move forward, passing by her while slicing the woman’s arm with a dagger that causes a lot of bleeding. The blood flowing down from Asami’s arm attracts the pitch black hands that were previously grabbing Korra. In a blink of her eyes, the hands from the void drag Asami into the darkness, disappearing in an instant.
“No… no… no…” she whimpers in denial as she collects Asami’s spilled blood on the ground.
“NOOOOO!”, anger and hurt fuel her in rage as she shouts with all of her strength.
And at that exact moment, the room is flooded with blood. Korra tries her best to swim, but she’s continuously sinking.
“ASAMI!”
Gasping for breath, Korra wakes up in cold sweats. Her throat hurts as if someone was choking her in her sleep. The pounding sound of her heartbeat as if she ran a marathon is echoing in her ears. As soon as her nerves have calmed down, her tears start falling uncontrollably. She instantly wipes the tears away over and over, but her eyes are like an inexhaustible fountain. Surrendering herself to grief, she lets the tears flow as she curls herself in and pulls her knees together. Grief eats her. Every single night.
The room fills with Korra’s sobs in the middle of the evening. The window in her room is left open where the moonlight shines. Tonight is a full moon; it’s the same night where her nightmares turned into reality. The night she wished it never happened. Korra slowly sits up to rest her back against the wall that is adjacent to her bed. The tears in her face dried after sobbing her heart out. The heaviness in her heart is still there, lingering. It never disappears, not since that night of pain, terror, and loss. She raises her right hand in the moonlight that beams brighter by the second. The scars in her hand seem to come alive under the moon. At times the lines bleed, as if, she was in that cold and deathly room once again. A quick rush of fear runs through Korra from head to toe. By squinting her eyes, she shakes the creeping fear off.
“I miss you…” she whispers to herself.
The following morning.
The smell of roasted coffee lingers around the cafe. It’s been Korra’s routine to get her morning coffee at Joe’s after her morning training. Today seems to be another slow morning in town. There is a good count of tables available, so she decides to enjoy her coffee there. The past nights have been a struggle. The nightmares have been causing her sleepless nights for the previous month. As a result, coffee turned to be her best friend.
“Thank you, Opal” she nods at the barista behind the counter after getting her drink. As she turns around, she almost bumps into a tall raven haired woman, which she never noticed walking up in line behind her a few minutes ago. Korra almost spills her coffee on the woman’s red vest.
“Yikes, that was close” she looks up, her eyes instantly meeting a pair of dark emerald orbs. A face that she could never forget, now with an obvious scar on the left cheek. Korra freezes momentarily. For a moment, her body appears to be paralyzed. And the beautiful pair of emerald eyes isn’t looking away either.
She’s back.
After recovering from the brief shock, Korra hopefully waits for Asami's reaction. After a few seconds, the raven-haired woman raises her right eyebrow in confusion. She has been staring at the woman longer than a stranger normally should.
Please, please, please…
“We will send her overseas for more advanced techniques to try a cure and for her fast recovery. There’s almost zero chance of her recovering the lost memories, but we will do our best,” she remembers what Asami’s doctors said a month ago.
Asami… Korra’s shoulders slump slightly in defeat. It’s good to see you, love. And smiles dryly.
As if nothing happened, she crooks her eyebrow too with a smirk on her lips, “All yours, Miss”. She calmly walks past Asami, leaving the woman puzzled by what just transpired — an intense eye contact and a weird tension that disappeared in a flash. But for Korra, it was nothing like a brief encounter. Her emotions are already building up by the second.
I have to get out of here.
Korra’s slow and calm steps shortly turn into a brisk walk as soon as Asami’s attention turns to giving the order to the barista. If she could just disappear the moment the cafe door closed she would’ve. Instead, without looking back, she runs as fast as she could, leaving her coffee at one of the outdoor tables. On her rush, she accidentally bumps into Bolin, who’s texting while walking towards the cafe. Korra’s tears have begun to flow heavily, her surroundings are blurry, the faces of every person she encounters are blank.
Asami was looking back at her after giving the order to Opal, but Korra didn’t see that either. The woman’s eyes show confusion with a hint of loneliness as if lost in a void.
After what seems like an eternity of running, Korra arrives at a mountain cliff where the waves meet the stony edges of the mountain below. She looks directly at the horizon. The sea is calm while the sun is setting. Despite the calmness of the sea, the sky is the opposite, it’s gradually turning blood red. She loves the sunset; it gives her comfort. But not this time. Right now, she feels like the dusk sky is the loneliest view she’s ever seen.
There should be comfort in the fact that both she and Asami are alive and breathing. However, it's impossible for her to find comfort at the moment. Maybe she's being selfish for feeling heartbroken. Or perhaps, she's too exhausted to think straight.
She stares at the bloody sky while letting her uncontrollable tears continue to fall.
“So, what now, Korra?”