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It was her wedding. She was so happy. She was marrying the avatar! Her love, such a handsome man. She was so happy she didn’t register the scuttles behind her as her hands were bound to his until the smiles of everyone around her turned to horror and-
Asami woke up, sweating and gasping. Her sheets were soaked through and her clock hands pointed to a little past three when she checked it. Her bed linens were absolutely done for but Mariko wouldn’t be in to clean them until later in the morning so she pulled them off herself and dumped them in her laundry basket. She needed a bath. She could do that for herself at least.
The fucking hot water wasn’t ever good at this time of night. She’d be taking a look at that in the morning because this was the third middle of the night bath this week and she was tired of shivering in lukewarm bathwater. Her skin was sticky and gross and she needed to clean it.
She ran a tentative hand through her hair, her fingernails turning up flecks of dandruff and more grease than she’d like. She had been putting off a proper hair wash for a while and as she was already in there… well. No point wasting the bathwater now.
A lot of her peers needed, or preferred, to have servants wait on them and wash their hair for them, and Asami could appreciate a good hair wash, but there was something nice too about the ritual of just cleaning herself, in privacy, with her own thoughts. She could never relax the same about other people, couldn’t let go of her performance of the public figure she was. The only time she could was when she was fully alone. She had that now, at least.
She tried to recall her dream now but only got snatches of the last part while she waited on the conditioner. Two water droplets raced down her leg and she internally bet on the one furthest away from her face to win and cheered to herself when the closer one got caught on a leghair and was thus roundly defeated.
Those dreams… they felt different than her other dreams. She had no memory of the occurrences in them but she knew them. They were set in stone for her. An external her knew that the bride who was also her would be grabbed without fail, even though the bride who was her didn’t, only thinking of her husband and his handsome face and their wedding and lives together. It wasn’t like her dream where she backflipped into the bay off a crane but got snatched by a massive bird at the last minute or the one where she was making an engine for her dad but kept slipping up and dropping tools. She hates that last one but it didn’t come with dread, just disappointment.
The wedding was group A of weird dreams. She should probably be writing this sort of thing down but in her defence, she was literally in the bath.
Group B had similar themes. She was in love with the Avatar, a tall woman this time, but she never saw her face. Just long dark hair and the words ‘horse stance’ remained in her memory when she woke up from group B dreams. Group B wasn’t as… distressing as group A. She quite often woke up normally from group B. Group A just shoved her awake as unpleasantly as her brain knew how.
Her timer went off and Asami drowned herself in the rinse. It was still a long time till morning.
She’d never enjoyed pro-bending tournaments before but her boyfriend was on a team and she was sponsoring it. He did a cute backflip, bending from his feet to land a severe blow onto his opponent and she smiled. His teammate, the Avatar herself, took out the waterbender on the opposing team, blasting him off the platform.
From the distance, Asami couldn’t see if she was glistening from water or sweat. She was glowing though, in the artificial arena light and her muscles were straining with pure power.
After the match (victory to the Fire Ferrets), she joined them at the bar. Bolin had a beer, as did his brother, with an arm slung around her shoulder. Korra stuck to water, her eyes scanning the crowd. She winked at Asami when she caught her looking and Asami glanced away, momentarily embarrassed. Mako looked confused when he felt her move but he didn’t say anything, just went back to looking at Bolin fail to chat up a waitress. It was almost as amusing as the match, she admitted, but more repetitive than watching the avatar kick someone violently off a tall platform. Asami wasn’t sure if that actually was part of being the bridge between worlds but she was no sage anyway.
“You look familiar, are you sure we’ve never met?” Korra asked her when they were standing outside together, getting some fresh air when the inside of the bar had gotten too hot and far too loud.
“I’ve never been to the Southern Water Tribe.”
“And I’ve never been outside it before.”
“What do you think of the outside world?”
Korra was looking at her so intently she was slightly frightened. “Busy. Fun. Good food.”
“All things Republic City is known for. It’s not usual though, is it for an Avatar not to travel?”
Korra looked thoughtful, “I don’t know, really. Aang travelled but he was outrunning the Fire Nation army for some of it and trying to beat them for the rest of it. Afterwards he was focused on reconstruction. Kyoshi had to outrun Jianzhu and Yun. Sozin didn’t travel at all. Any other Air Avatar records have been destroyed and I’m not very good at contacting them yet.” Her eyes glazed over, thinking of deeper things.
“Must’ve been lonely,” Asami offered.
Korra looked shy. It didn’t suit her, “People visited sometimes. And I had my teachers. But I never had friends my own age. Jinora and my cousins from the Northern Water Tribe were the closest and Jinora is a little kid and my cousins creep me out. I mean, they can be fun but always make sure you can leave, you know? Don’t get locked in a room with them.”
“I don’t have any cousins,” Asami offered. “Or, uh, a lot of friends either.”
Korra took the hint and interlinked their arms, “Just another thing we have in common then.” She smiled, wonkily, one side of her mouth much higher than the other, hitting her so sharply with a wave of déjà vu that she stumbled. Korra grabbed her before she fell, her arm twisted awkwardly, not spraining or breaking.
“Whoa,” Strong arms lifted her back to standing, “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine, sorry, I don’t know what that was.”
“Let me walk you home,” Korra said suddenly. The boys had left a while ago, Asami realised, and she felt in no state to dive herself home now. Her own personal bodyguard? The avatar? It seemed hilarious but she wasn’t able to figure out why. But if that was happening in the daylight, while she was wide awake, she needed to see someone about it.
“You’re remembering,” the sage had sprayed out so much incense she was trying to to cough/cry her way through this fairly pricey situation.
“Remembering what?” She blinked furiously, and was glad she’d opted against any makeup for this. That would have been messy.
The sage apparently didn’t hear her, their hands trained entirely on shapes made by the smoke in this awful dank room. “It’s most unusual. Normally nothing of the soul remembers upon rebirth.”
“You mean I’m remembering a past life?” The sage fixed her with her look that made her feel as tall as Korra. She shifted uncomfortably, more now from that gaze than the incense she was still struggling to breathe through.
“Yes. More than one given what you’ve told me. There are snatches of others but the ones most clearly are ones spent with the Avatar. Such exposure to the bridge between worlds could have a leaking effect.”
“But the Avatar doesn’t remember her own past lives. They tell her things directly but she doesn’t know them,” She pointed out. The sage looked annoyed.
“That is the Avatar . The rules are different around her. You however… a normal human who has been exposed to things around the Avatar over more than one lifetime. Especially in one… that is a long and deep exposure to the Spirits. Likely the cause of death.”
“Do you know who I was?” She leaned forward eagerly.
They just looked bored, “Not exactly but guesses and estimates could be made based on memories and recorded histories, provided they are accurate. Romantic, perhaps. Or intensely close friendship. Not likely a blood relation. And within the last cycle or so. The furthest back is probably at most… Yangchen or Kuruk. Maybe Szeto but I doubt it. Even in situations like that, the memories fade after time, even if you were associated with the Avatar at the time.” They stood up and extinguished the flame. “I hope you have enjoyed your time here today, that will be 900, thank you.”
Asami trawled her purse for coins, handed over the exact amount, plus tip and drank three full glasses of water before she headed to the library. Her parking job was shoddy but that didn’t matter. She had research to do, and she was ready to test the limits of her access at the Republic City Archive in their Avatar history section. Worst coming to the worst, she could probably get a work around with the White Lotus. Or a heist, but that would be ridiculous, and hopefully unnecessary.
Korra tracked her down in her office just as she was running a string between pins on her board of information. The wedding horror memories were with a water avatar: Kuruk, therefore Ummi, but she couldn’t figure out the other one. She was with a woman but was it Yangchen or Kyoshi? The woman was tall but so were both of them, Yangchen was an airbender and Kyoshi had an airbender mother according to notes taken by later Air Abbott Jinpa, when he travelled with her.
“What the fuck is this?”
She paused, mouth slightly agape. She hadn’t thought about how on earth to talk to Korra about all this. It was all a bit unbelievable, hence why she put it off for so many years to even start to deal with. She still did her best to explain though, in winding sentences as difficult to follow as an outer ring street in Ba Sing Se. Korra looked mildly alarmed but understanding as Asami got out her pointer stick and started showing her how she was adding things together.
She came up behind her, adding things in, things she’d been told by Past Lives. “I agree about Ummi. She died… before Rangi Sei’Naka was born. I’m not sure when exactly but Rangi was the same age as Kyoshi and therefore…” Asami could add two plus two.
Korra continued, voice somewhere other as she talked, “Yangchen’s lover wasn’t a woman. His name was Kavik. Are you sure of your gender in those memories?” She had made the assumption she was, in fact, a woman in any memory but why did she think that? Korra had been any number of gender in her recorded past lives, anyone could be any gender they could be reborn as. Not even as a human. It was hardly a one to one comparison.
Asami reminded her about Horse Stance and Korra got a look in her eye that she was sure meant some awful idea had come to her. “I’ll ask. I mean… narrowing it down to two makes it a lot easier to dig down. Give me a few days.”
Asami was so surprised by how much it made sense, she didn’t even react when Korra kissed her on the cheek before she left.