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It had been two weeks since the attack during the council meeting and everyone who had been harmed was reported alright. Lin didn't know what she would have done if there had been casualties.
Those were the most important people in the city, in the world, and no matter how talented or self-sufficient they were, they had been under her police department’s protection. Her protection.
She had checked on every single one of them thoroughly. Except… maybe, possibly, certainly Tenzin. How was she supposed to ask about his wellbeing outright without sounding strange? Their history made everything complicated, and everyone involved knew it. Thankfully, after the attack, the councilman had not returned to Air Temple Island. He had claimed his injuries could be tended to anywhere and that he needed to investigate what he called "a possible act of terrorism." Lin was grateful for that. It made it easier for her conscience to make sure he was fine. She wasn't sure she'd handle it particularly well if Tenzin had been seriously injured protecting people she herself was supposed to protect.
He had been stabbed in the neck. It sounded horrific, spirits knew it had made her blood run cold the first time she heard it phrased that way too, but the blade hadn't cut a single major nerve. He was alright, though he also had some lingering shoulder issue. He was determined to train the damage out of it once he healed, which was exactly what he was doing when she finally paid an official visit after it became increasingly clear that not visiting him would seem stranger than visiting him.
She was led to a courtyard in the council estate, where Tenzin was sparring with a boy much younger than him. In looser circumstances she might have told him to know his age, but she kept quiet. Instead, she gave... Pema a polite smile ,or as civil as Lin has always been. The woman stood watching with a boy on her hip, her eyes were fond but slightly concerned as she observed her husband.
"Oh, Lin, you didn’t have to come" Pema said with a smile.
"Yeah, well..." Lin trailed off. "I couldnt not. How is he?"
"Take a look for yourself. He’s doing very well" Pema replied warmly.
Very well indeed. Lin's eyes traced over his figure. The man stayed in far too good shape for a monk in his fifties. A thin sheen of sweat caught the sunlight across his shoulders. Blue tattoos flowed over broad muscle and disappeared beneath the fabric at his waist.
Tenzin had always been pleasing to look at, that wasn't exactly news.
Fortunately, her eyes were familiar enough with his body that she could keep her expression perfectly neutral despite the faint flutter in her chest and knew to keep her eyes where circumstances made it reasonable for her to, focused on the scar crossing one shoulder.
"Oh, don't worry. That's not from the attack." Pema had apparently mistaken the direction of her attention.
"The thing on his chest," she clarified cluelessly "The first time he flew, apparently he kept scraping himself in the same spot where the glider touchd, over and over. It scarred eventually."
High on his chest there was a mechanical looking patchwork of tiny scars accumulated over years.
She bit the inside of her cheek.
"I'm glad. Had me wondering." She lied.
About at that time she'd felt the sparring stopping and Tenzin turned toward her.
"Lin," he said in a voice fond and tired and for that - breathless... and polite all at once. The sound hit her straight down to her toes. She was usually better at keeping Tenzin separate from a certain train of thought that moved through her, made her body sickeningly aware of where he was and where she wanted him to be. Some days were harder than others.
"Tenzin. You know me... I had to check" she said, the words clipped and familiar.
"I know you." He agreed. His eyes were calm and maybe wondering, she was unsure as she was kind of trying to avoid reading too much into them.
"Should we talk?" he asked.
There was a tone to it that made her (no, fuck that, there wasn't a tone whatsoever. But she'd spent a good 10 seconds looking at him shirtless and, right now, everything out of his mouth came out sexually polished to her ears) want to turn to his wife, that was just there with his kid, to make sure she wasn't caught in this suggestive conversation.
There wasn't a suggestion, damn it.
"Are you going to scold me? Because I apologized alr-"
"Chief Beifong," he interrupted "would you be willing to discuss the new security measures? I couldn't attend the first meeting and would appreciate hearing the logistics behind the final decision firsthand. I've only received the written report."
That was, in fact, a perfectly reasonable explanation, which was the only reason she followed him into a sunlit room.
Tenzin sat down on a low bench inside. Still being slightly out of breath from training, he draped a towel around his shoulders and began drying himself off.
Lin, as any woman in her situation, looked elsewhere.
"It was decided the day after the meeting that the measure of-"
"Lin." As disinterested as one could be, he interrupted her before she could get any further. "It's not your fault."
Half a second later and only half a breath, her eyes were glaring down at him. "Shut up, Tenzin."
"I know you," he echoed her own words back at her. "And I know when you're unsettled."
For one reason or another.
"And I know when something is eating at you. It's been tearing you up for days. It wasnt your fault."
"It was my responsibility." She argued
"In the same line of thinking, it was mine. And everyone else's who was responsible for that building, or the city itself." He rose to his feet. "You're part of a system that failed. Once."
The look he gave her was so openly concerned, so genuinely caring, that she almost became angry at him for it.
Because her chest felt warm and painfully tight, she couldn't look him in the eyes any longer, so she let them fall, fall on the scar on his chest... a perfect change of subject.
She should really be above this kind of pettiness.
She should also be above getting wet over her ex lover.
She was having a stellar day.
"You're very good at flying" she said casually.
Tenzin blinked, confused at that.
Her gaze flicked to his eyes and back again to the scar, pointing at it.
"You could've lied about something that didn't undermine your reputation." Now it was his turn to look away.
"I mean," she continued, poking "I remember how happy your father was about how quickly you picked it up. Notoriously talented at flying, Tenzin. Not exactly the kind of person who crashes into things with his glider." Mockery and slight offence in all of her compliments.
A reluctant and guilty, sad, smile tugged at his mouth.
"Nothing else came to mind when she asked."
Well, yes, Lin thought. The truth wouldn't have done.
"I never thought it'd last this long" she admitted. "I mean, the whole point was to..."
She gestured vaguely toward the scar.
"Mark me before they marked me." he finished for her.
Years ago, a week or so before Tenzin's tattoo ceremony, his girlfriend had been prickly and bitter about the impending marks. As a joke, he had told her she could always go first.
It hadnt been a joke to her.
Using the small knife Uncle Sokka had once given him and happened to be on the nightstand, Lin had for the first time carved "Lin Beifong's" onto his chest while he was still inside her in their bedroom.
Practical even in her possessiveness, she made the cuts shallow so they would eventually heal into an unreadable scrawl by the time he had his tattoos done.
"Can I renew them?" she had asked when she contemplated her practicality, staring at the picture that he was, she breathless on top of him with her fingertip pushing up a bloody drip back up not to reach the white sheets.
Bloody and eager beneath her, he had promised she could renew them whenever she liked.
"Whenever she liked" turned out to be every month. Sometimes more.
At that point in his life, he saw nothing wrong with it.
He was aware that there was something doomed about him and Lin. Yet he loved her so completely that he couldn't bring himself to care that some future wife of his, by that point entirely hypothetical, might one day have to look upon marks another woman had left behind. It was Lin.
If Lin had asked for more, he would have given more.
She could have painted him from head to toe.
There was guilt tangled up in that willingness, that he felt for knowing he would ultimately choose duty over her. In his head there were moments in which she was equal to that duty and in those moments it only seemed right to give her everything, he had given it
The air nation had him marked - she could mark him as well.
Back in the present, Tenzin turned around to avoid her gaze and paced for a bit, giving her a clear view of where the knife had gone to his neck.
"You had me so worried" Lin said.
"You had me so worried," he echoed.
"I wasnt scratched." she insisted.
"Do you know what youre- what you're like?" he asked, turning back to her. "How self-blaming you can be? And I used to be able to..." He shook his head. "I know how you can be, and I cant help you like I used to."
Like he used to meant emotional support, knowing her completely, and also sex to release the pressure. Hearing the emotional tone in his throat, she figured he was sentimental over the first one.
"And I was scared of what youd try to do. Put your life in some weird danger to try and fix-" He stopped. "You had me worried, Lin. We're both fine though." He said it simply. "We're fine."
"Didnt realize how jarring my nature was to you," she muttered. Maybe she wasnt within her rights, but right now everything that wasnt him touching her was making her a notch more irritated.
"I didnt say that"
"How I can be?" she quoted, squinting. "Spirits, Tenzin, im sorry-"
"I love everything about you, come on" he said, annoyed. "Everything about you is annoyingly you, and we both know what you being you does to me, for fucks sake."
He also got irritated over much less than she knew he could otherwise handle, which made her think...They were both irritated for reasons beyond this conversation. Then her eyes fell to his body again. And to his scar again.
Hers. Technically.
My, my.
He was kissing her then, grabbing her by the jaw, to swallow her lips in his.
At first it was frustrated, born from all the years theyd spent frustrated with each other, but this was also what used to soothe that frustration once. Relief flooded in, along with a rush of frantic heat, blood pounding in her head as their lips moved urgently until they both realized the other was kissing back desperately.
That allowance from each other made it feel, for a moment, like the world had actually permitted this, too.
If either of them had felt the punch of guilt or clarity, they would have flinched back by now. But they didn’t. Instead, they kept sucking and grappling at each other. Lin’s hands found his chest, using it as leverage to pull him backward until he dropped willingly onto the low bench with his eyes so intensely glued to hers.
How she loved seeing him like this - he looked completely fallen into her. He was... hers. There wasnt a single molecule in his body that suggested he had ever been a thing else.
She swung her legs over and straddled his lap. His hands were on her uniform immediately like magnets, sliding from her hips down to grip her thighs. In his eyes she could see the way falling off his duty sent him spiraling into complete denial. It made him a sweet talker, a flirt, to ignore the knowledge of the pain and headache that would come after.
With a charming voice he said "Might need some help here." His hands applied firm pressure to her thighs as he nipped at her neck, kissing from her jaw down and pecking at the skin above the collar of her clothes. "Forgotten how these things work" he added without much space between his mouth and her skin still.
"Used to be second nature" she murmured herself bitter still because unlike him, she didn’t have those bipolar-bordering tendencies to fall back on from one extreme to the other.
(Usually it was Tenzin who strayed from extremes. It had been that way in the beginning, but now he was taking what he might never have again, what he had spent a good while believing he never would. Where Lin had always known she would be bitterly in love with Tenzin and wanted nothing to do with him, he had once believed he could be civil with her. Now all of that felt like a lie he desperately wanted to forget, so he slipped into a state of mind in which… he wasnt married.)
"Maybe I just want to see you do it," he whispered against her ear which had her positively swallow her air.
Lin placed one of her hands on the top one of his and tugged it up, pressing it over her chest.
"Thats how it went?" Tenzin hummed, letting his palm linger on her breast a second longer.
She smirked to that before saying "Something like it."
She guided his fingers higher, to the button she got him to press and with little of her bending it all went off her. Her uniform fell open, leaving only a thin white linen top and her underwear. From the way Tenzins eyes dragged over her, it was still far too much.
He looked his fill of her shoulders, collarbones, the line of her breasts, then ran his hand down her arm and under the linen, tugging it off then. "You're remarkable" he said quietly.
It was still his favorite praise. Hers too. It slipped out of him like simple fact, never sounding like flattery the way "gorgeous" or "beautiful" did from him
She hummed, unimpressed yet she rolled her hips down against the hard line of him. The thin cloth between them might as well not exist she was soaked. Their hands stayed restless, tugging, scratching, gripping. There was nothing else either of them wanted to do.
Her fingertips traced the side of his neck, mapping every new line that hadn’t been there the last time she’d touched him like this. Eventually they drifted lower, brushing lightly over the old scars on his chest. Tenzin noticed that shed been far more vicious with her nails everywhere else.
"You want to go over them again?" he whispered.
Lin met his eyes. "It's fine." Her words were flat and her thumb lingered over the faded mark. "If you know what it used to say, you can still make it out."
A smirk pulled at his mouth - he knew that.
Some mornings he still caught himself looking at it in the mirror reading what wasn't really there anymore.
Her gaze flicked down to the small knife she carried in her uniform, sometimes useful in her line of work, and Tenzin knew her denial was a farce.
"…Do it."
"She'll see" Lin said. Even if Tenzin was content to pretend he wasn't married while he was touching her like this, if he needed to to touch her like this, she wanted it clear opposite. Wanted him to know that he is very married, he'll always be and with that... He's hers still. "Even someone like her is going to ask questions if you suddenly start avoiding taking your shirt off."
"Mark me, Lin." he said anyway and a stream of air got the knife from the ground where her clothes had fallen to his hand ,opened and offering to her. And it didn't take long for her to take it.
He held his breath and when the first little line did it he swallowed a hiss ,there was always something that irritated Lin about good of a control Tenzin's monk training got him.
She set the blade aside for a second down next to where he sat and let blood go down in a light stream ,if that, as she tugged his pants down and inserted him inside her. Because it'd make his unraveling all the... Easier.
His hands were again gripping at her tighs as she resumed her handy work and now - he was gasping. For every pain he felt ,he gripped her tighter to a point she was sure she'd have visible marks on herself as well.
They dressed themselves and Tenzin grabbed a shirt from some closet in the room, before he put it on ,Lin gave a last look at her signature.
"...you can renew them whenever you like ,you know" he said hismelf before putting it on
"Can I?" She mused
Was the most righteous man she knew asking her for an affair?
"You can always do whatever you like to me." And then he... Left.