Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

"Okay, try now."

Asami's voice came muffled from under the left engine housing, half swallowed by the open casing and the concrete acoustics of the hangar. Dawn saw her pull back from the mount, hands lifting clear, one wrist coming up to push a loose strand of hair off her forehead.

He ducked into the cabin. The seat was too small for the frame they'd bolted around it, a placeholder like everything else here, and he folded himself down over the panel he knew better than his own hands by now. Fuel primer: four pumps, slow, until the resistance changed. Breaker: up. A half second for the needle on the pressure gauge to settle where he wanted it. Then the ignition.

The right engine caught.

He felt it before he heard it — a rising whine through the fuselage, the bladeless rotor spinning up clean and true. Right side: nominal. He counted the seconds it took to reach steady pitch. Four. Correct.

The left one did nothing.

Not a stutter, not a cough of fuel finding the chamber and losing it. Nothing. He watched the gauge for the left bank stay flat, the needle dead where he'd left it, and past the windscreen he could see Asami still crouched on the concrete beside the open engine, one hand flat against the housing, her head tilted at the angle it took when she was listening to a machine instead of looking at it.

One engine turning, one engine still. A flier like that would only ever pull itself in a circle.

He killed the ignition and let the whine wind down.

"Nothing on the left," he said, though she already knew. "Not even a catch."

"You sure you checked the wiring?"

She said it the way she said everything under a machine, flat, not accusing, just eliminating a variable. He watched her thumb trace the loom where it fed into the housing, following each lead by touch.

"Yes," he said. "And you checked the current on the plugs three times in the last five hours."

"Then it must be the distribution system." She sat back on her heels. "Maybe the valve's over-tightened."

"Talo took the whole distribution system apart and put it back together yesterday. It works." He kept his eyes on the left gauge, that dead flat needle, as if it might change its mind. "Maybe the injector."

"No." She shook her head, sharp. "I heard the injection. Do it again — I'll listen for the sparks."

He didn't argue. There was a comfort in this, actually — one he'd stopped noticing until a night like this one: the way they narrowed a problem between them without either of them needing to explain the step they were on. He reset the breaker, primed it again — four pumps, slow — and this time when he pressed the ignition he watched her instead of the panel.

Asami leaned in close over the open engine, head tilted, one ear all but pressed to the block. The right rotor spun up behind him, filling the hangar with its rising whine, and she waited it out, unmoving, listening past it for the small sound underneath.

He killed it.

"No spark." She straightened, and for a moment she just looked at the injector, her jaw setting in that hard line. "But how?"

He was already working backward through the day in his head, laying the hours out like parts on a bench. Housing off, housing on. The seat of the loom. The ground strap he'd wrestled back over the mount because it had fought him.

"We must've broken something when we put the housing back," he said.

"You mean you must've broken something."

There it was. Not even a smile on her — she'd said it to the engine, deadpan, still cataloguing failure points. But he heard the shape of the joke in it.

Dawn rolled his eyes and looked past her, up to the clock bolted high on the hangar wall. The hands had moved further than he'd wanted them to. Much further. The light through the high windows had gone from grey to nothing while they'd been down in the guts of the thing, and he hadn't noticed that either.

"Anyway," he said, "we're not taking it apart today." He set the breaker down and started uncoiling himself from the too-small seat, one leg stiff from being folded under him too long. "So you'll have to wait to savor my incompetence tomorrow. We'll be late."

That last landed differently than the rest. They'd both been half-racing a clock neither of them had said out loud, and the moment to stop and still make it had come and gone an hour back.

He wiped his hands on the rag hooked at his belt and looked at the ungainly two-engine flier. Tomorrow's problem. He made himself leave it there.

"No we won't," Asami said. "I'll get us there in time."

She said it with the certainty of a woman who had privately timed the drive and shaved margin off it, and he believed her.

They were walking to the hangar door. Dawn reached the bank of switches and cut the lights in a row, top to bottom, and the hangar went from steel and shadow to just shadow. He didn't touch the lock. There was nothing to lock — the experimental facility sat wedged between the two peaks like a coin dropped edgewise into a crack, one road in, gated at the throat of the valley. Anyone who got this far had already been let past.

Outside the air had gone cold, thin and clean, carrying nothing of the city. They crossed the airstrip side by side, boots loud on the tarmac, the paint stripes running away pale under their feet toward the black shapes of the mountains. What he liked out here at this hour, honestly, was the emptiness, the fact that there was nothing to catalogue but distance. It was one of the few places he didn't feel watched.

The office building rose ahead, three stories, most of its windows dark. Inside, at the split of the corridor, they parted without a word: he turned for the changing rooms, she turned the other way, toward the offices.

His raincoat was where he'd left it on the hook, stiff and smelling faintly of oil. He shrugged it on.

He expected to find her at the door with an armful of nothing, ready to go.

Instead the office was still dark, and she was still in it.

One lamp burned at her desk, a small pool of yellow in all that black glass and empty furniture, and Asami stood inside it, not sitting, bent over a report she held open in both hands. She wasn't reading it so much as consuming it, flipping a page, then another, her eyes moving fast down each one. He stopped in the doorway and watched her a moment before he crossed to her, and he read the weather off her before he read a single word on the paper.

A front had moved through while she read. The lamp caught the hard set of her jaw, and her thumb turned a page with a snap that was almost violent for how still the rest of her was.

He came closer, stopped at the edge of the lamplight. He didn't ask what it was.

So he coughed instead, quiet, into the stillness.

"We really are going to be late."

For a second she didn't move at all. Then she nodded and closed the report — but she didn't put it down. She folded it under her arm, tucked against her side the way you'd carry something you meant to keep arguing with, and reached over to switch off the lamp.

The office went fully dark. He heard her exhale, one measured breath, and then her boots turned toward the door.

They took the stairs down and then the road, the office at their backs, the gate lights ahead throwing two long cones of yellow across the tarmac. The checkpoint was a booth the size of a broom closet, and the man inside it had made himself comfortable — chair tipped back, both boots crossed on the desk, a newspaper held up in front of his face like a wall he'd built for the night.

Dawn placed him. Older, heavyset, a mustache going grey. Ohai, on the night rotation. He never bothered pretending to be busy.

"You're late, Miss Sato," Ohai said, not lowering the paper. His eyes stayed on the page. "Dawn." Bored.

"Don't worry," Asami said, smooth, with a thin edge of something under it. "The overtime's on me."

She dropped the ring of keys on the corner of his desk. It landed with a flat metal slap, and Ohai grunted, which was all the acknowledgment either the joke or the keys were going to get.

Dawn's eyes went to the newspaper before he could stop them. Front page. Big type across the top, the kind they saved for the stories that sold themselves.

AVATAR CAPTOR TELLS ALL.

He looked away. Fast — but not fast enough. He fixed his gaze on the far side of the gate instead, on the dark road, on nothing, kept his face still and walked.

They passed through the gate and out onto the lot.

It was empty. A hundred marked spaces and three cars — Asami's near the front, and two others huddled off toward the fence. Their footsteps carried a long way out here.

She unlocked the satomobile, and tossed the report on the back seat behind them. Then she pulled her door shut, he pulled his, and the engine turned over on the first try, clean, patient, nothing like the one they'd left dead on the hangar floor.

Asami put it in gear and drove.

The road came down off the mountain in long switchbacks, and Asami took them faster than she needed to. She wasn't reckless. She never was. But there was a margin she usually kept between herself and the edge of the car's ability, and tonight she'd spent it. Her hands sat at the wheel tighter than the driving asked for, knuckles standing up under the leather.

Below them the city unrolled — the harbor a black plate, the lights strung out in grids and threads, the arena a bright lozenge on the dark water. He watched it come up to meet them and said nothing. He did not tell her it would be fine. He'd learned that much: that a soft word laid on Asami Sato was a word wasted, that she filed comfort under noise and worked around it. His fingers tapped a slow figure against his knee instead. Four beats. Reset. Four beats.

"Okay," he said finally. "How bad is it."

"What is?"

"Asami." He didn't look at her. He looked at the report riding loose on the back seat in the mirror. "Half a year?"

She didn't answer. The headlights swept a guardrail, a road sign, the black wall of a cut through the rock.

"Three months?"

"Four," she said. Dry and clinical. "If I can sell the house quick enough."

Four months until Future Industries ran out of money. Worse than he thought, but not critical.

"We'll make it work," he said. "The prototype will be in the air in less than a month. You know that as well as I do." A switchback pulled him against the door and released him. "Have faith."

Asami sighed, a long one drawn up from somewhere lower than her chest, and he heard her take a breath after it, deliberate. Restoring the calm by force. The car slowed, very slightly. Her grip eased.

"That's not the issue," she said. "The technology works. But nobody sees the technology, Dawn. Nobody sees the opportunity. They see the bombs."

"They'll see it once you show them the numbers." He turned to look at her now, at her profile lit gold and moving by the passing lamps. "You told me that. When we started ten months ago. You said the numbers don't argue. What changed?"

For a moment the only sound was the engine, and the tires, and the wind pushing at the seams of the doors.

"Remember the weapons committee," she said. Not a question. "The ban ruling. After it went public — I got told, quietly, that the trade commission let all the big players know Future Industries is unfavorable." She said the word the way you'd hold something up with tongs. "Which, in that language, is a death mark. Nobody big enough to actually sign with us — nobody in the whole United Republic — will pick up my calls."

Dawn did the arithmetic he couldn't help doing. A ban on a weapon they'd never had the slightest intention of building. A restriction stamped onto the record for a factory that had lived under her own house, that she had walked down into and disarmed with her own hands. And now that mark hung on the company, on the aircraft, on her.

It was, he thought, exactly the kind of injustice that had no clean part to blame. No cylinder to pull, no valve to reseat. Just a machine of rumor and paperwork doing precisely what it was built to do.

"They banned you from making a thing you were never going to make," he said, "and now they're punishing you for the ban."

"Yes."

"That's—" He stopped. There was a word for it and it wasn't one of his measured ones, and she didn't need to hear him swear about her problem in her own car. He let the sentence go. His thumb went still.

The road bottomed out. The mountains fell away behind them and the city took them in, lamplit and loud even at this hour, and Asami slowed for the first real intersection and sat there with both wrists resting on the wheel, waiting for a light, her jaw set.

"Like any good problem, yours already contains the answer," he said suddenly.

The light was still red. Asami turned her head, not the whole way, just enough to give him one green eye and half a raised brow. "Since when are you a philosopher?"

"Since forever." He shrugged. "Haven't read my notes?"

"I read your book, Dawn. There was no philosophy in it. There were sentence-long descriptions of gun mechanisms."

"That's the applied kind." The light went green. She pulled through the intersection, and he felt the thing turning over in his head, the shape he'd been circling for the last mile of switchbacks without quite naming it, click into a form he could hand her. "Anyhow. Nobody in the United Republic will talk to you. Fine."

"Fine," she echoed, flat, watching the road.

"So don't talk to the United Republic." He heard his own voice picking up, the way it always did when a problem turned from a wall into a diagram. He pushed himself up straighter against the seat. "The world isn't just the United Republic. Right? The Republic's only the smallest, densest, most built-up corner of the whole map. Everyone already has roads here. Of course they don't need you — they can afford to be squeamish."

"Dawn—"

"No, listen. Go where it's less explored." He turned in the seat to face her now, one knee coming up onto the cushion, the night's fatigue burning off him. "The Earth Kingdom. It's enormous. There are cities out in the deserts three weeks' cart-haul from anything, choking to death over freight. You put a two-engine flier over that gap and you don't cut the time, you delete it. Days into hours."

Out the windscreen the harbor slid past, and he barely saw it. He was seeing the map instead.

"Or the Fire Nation," he went on. "It's islands, Asami. Islands. Half of governing the place is getting a person from one rock to another across open water. I'm sure we can make the planes land on water. Easy. Or—" and here his voice caught a little on the size of the idea, "—the Water Tribes. A fast southern-to-northern route. Weeks of open, frozen, murderous ocean, and you make it a morning. That isn't a shipping contract. That's a breakthrough."

He tapped the dashboard for emphasis.

"See? The world doesn't end at the harbor mouth. You don't have four months — you have four months here. You just have to—"

"If you say 'think bigger,'" Asami said, "I will punch you."

But there was no threat in it. He knew the sound of her actual warnings, and this wasn't one. Her eyes had changed. They'd narrowed, sharpened, gone somewhere past the road and the wheel. Her thumb began to tap a slow rhythm against the leather at ten o'clock. She'd started thinking. He'd know that anywhere.

He settled back into his seat, satisfied, and folded his arms.

"I wasn't going to say that," he said.

"You were absolutely going to say that."

"'I will punch you'. Korra and Mako are a bad influence on you," he grumbled.

"Says the man who lives with one of them."

"Which is how I know."

The arena grew ahead of them, its massive domed shape lit up gold, and the flags along its crown snapping in the sea wind. Asami swung them off the main road and into the wide mouth of the parking lot, and the change in surface came up through the seat — smooth pavement to the older, patched concrete of the lot, seams ticking past under the tires.

It was fuller here than the facility lot had been, but not full. Nothing like the crush the finals would bring, still half a year off. Cars clustered near the entrance and thinned toward the fences, and Asami was scanning for a space close in, chin lifted, slowing to a crawl.

Dawn saw it before she did.

Not a space. A shape. Two rows over, toward the darker end of the lot, low and pale and long between two parked satomobiles — the wrong size and the wrong stillness for anything a parking lot was supposed to hold.

"There." He lifted a hand, pointed past her, across the wheel. "Park there."

She turned the wheel, easing them down the row, and the headlights swung around and caught it full — a great white mass of fur laid out flat across two parking spaces and half of a third, one paw hooked over the bumper of the satomobile beside her, ears drooping, muzzle on the ground. Naga. Bored out of her considerable mind, and taking up more real estate than any three vehicles in the lot.

One dark eye rolled up into the headlights. Her tail thumped the concrete, once, without enthusiasm.

Asami let out a breath that was almost a laugh. It was the first thing that had sounded like her since the office. "Of course," she said. "Of course she's here."

Dawn found himself entertaining the picture: Korra folded into the back of a taxi, Naga's head jammed out one window and her hindquarters out the other, some poor cabbie white-knuckling the wheel. A huff of a laugh escaped him. She'd have walked her here. Ridden her. Same as always. The city bent around Korra, not the other way.

He had the door open before Asami finished killing the engine.

Naga was up and moving the instant his boot touched concrete, all that boredom sloughing off her at once, tail sweeping the pavement in polishing arcs. She lunged her head at him, tongue already out — and Dawn ducked. Not a startled dodge, but a clean, sideways lean of the whole upper body. The reflex of a man who had lost this exact contest too many times to lose it again. The tongue swiped the empty air where his face had been.

"Good try," he told her.

He put both hands into the deep fur beneath her chin and scratched, hard, the way she liked. Naga groaned and pressed into it, and her tail came around and thumped the side of the car parked next to her with a hollow, resonant bong that Dawn decided, for the sake of the car's owner, not to think about.

"Hey, girl." He worked his fingers deeper, up under the jaw where the fur went soft. "Sorry you've got to wait out here. Inside doesn't do priority seating for polar bear dogs. Believe me, I asked." Her ear flicked. "You been here long?"

Naga answered with a howl — low, drawn out, and so theatrically wounded that it echoed off the fenders around them, the sound of an animal who considered herself the single most neglected creature in Republic City. Then, mid-lament, she shoved her nose square into his coat pocket and rooted, and there was enough shove behind it that Dawn's heel skidded on the concrete and he had to plant his other foot fast to keep from going down entirely.

"No — no." He got a hand flat against her muzzle and steered it back out. "I didn't bring snacks either. My bad. Completely my fault, I own it." She gave him a look of pure, betrayed reproach, and he felt the guilt land somewhere real. Ridiculous. "I'll grab you something on the way back. I promise."

He scratched behind her ear to seal the deal, and Naga made the low contented sound that meant the debt had been noted and provisionally accepted. She yawned, a cavernous, tongue-curling yawn full of teeth the length of his fingers. Then she folded herself back down between the two cars with a heavy, satisfied whumph, chin returning to the pavement, one eye tracking him just in case the snacks materialized early.

Dawn straightened, brushed a drift of white fur off his coat, and turned back toward the satomobile.

Asami had come around the front, and she was watching the performance with her arms loosely crossed, and she was — fully, unguardedly — smiling. An actual smile, for a change.

"Okay." He jerked his head toward the bright dome of the arena. "Let's go — before she works out the doors are wide enough for her to fit through."

The entrance threw a wide fan of light across the concrete, and inside that light stood a knot of people. Three of them, maybe four. Notebooks. A camera slung on a strap.

Journalists.

He knew the posture instantly.

He reached up without breaking stride and flipped the hood of the raincoat over his head, tugged it forward until the brim cut the light down to a strip of pavement, and turned his face a few degrees off their line — casual, a man cold in the sea wind, nothing more. He fixed his eyes on the doors and walked toward them as if the group by the wall were furniture.

Asami fell in beside him.

"How bad is it?" she said.

The same four syllables he'd used.

"I never knew being a nobody was such a blessing," he muttered, and kept his chin down. "I preferred being a rumor. A rumor doesn't get its photograph taken buying a polar bear dog a snack."

"Well." He could hear the dry lift in her voice. "What did you expect?"

He groaned and put his palm flat to the door and pushed.

Warmth, noise, and light met them. The hall swallowed the sea wind whole. They joined the crowd pooling in from all the mouths of the corridor, a slow bright river moving toward the seats, and he let the hood come back down off his head now that there were a thousand faces to disappear into instead of four to be found by. Better. Anonymous by volume.

They found a bench along the near curve and sat, and the arena opened below them — the raised ring, the water beneath it waiting, the far side filling.

"How about," Asami said, settling, "we stop thinking about all of this for at least one night?"

"Yeah." He watched the empty ring. "That I can do."

He lied. He knew it.

"Me too," she said, and leaned back against the row behind, and let out a breath.

He knew she was lying too.

The lights hadn't dropped yet. The far tiers were still filling, faces stacked up in the gold house-light, and Dawn ran his eyes along them left to right, top to bottom, taking stock.

"Bet I can find him before you do," he said suddenly.

"Bet." Asami didn't even take the time to scan. She lifted one hand and pointed across the open drop of the arena to the far curve. "You lost. There he is."

Dawn followed her gesture and squinted.

Too far to make out the gold running along the cuffs, but he knew it was there — the set he'd had specially made and would not shut up about. Rooni. Standing in the aisle where a reasonable person would have already sat down, one arm looped around each of two girls, holding court.

Dawn couldn't possibly hear a word of it at this range. He didn't have to. He read it off the shape of the man — the theatrical sweep of the temporarily freed hand, the pause held one beat too long, then the little rocking step back to sell the ending. Telling a story. A heroic one, and a funny one, by the choreography of it. Maybe the one the two of them had actually lived through together. More likely one of the many Rooni had carefully constructed from scratch.

Both girls doubled over laughing.

Yeah. Not the shared one.

"How did you do that," he said, still watching. "You didn't even look."

"I looked earlier." Asami settled back, entirely unbothered by her victory. "He was doing the exact same thing when we walked in. Different girls."

"Different—" Dawn shook his head slowly. "That's not finding him. That's remembering him."

"You bet on finding. I found. Twice, apparently." She folded her hands. "Pay up whenever's convenient."

Dawn opened his mouth, weighed the terms of a bet neither of them had actually set, and closed it again.

The house-lights dropped.

They went all at once, the bright bowl of the arena falling to shadow, and the crowd noise crested and broke into a roar. A single spotlight punched down onto the ring, and the water beneath it threw the light back up in a wavering ceiling of reflections across the underside of everything. Dawn felt the sound in his sternum before it registered as sound.

"Ladies and gentlemen—" The announcer's voice came booming out of everywhere and nowhere, a voice built for exactly this room. "—welcome, welcome, to a very special night!"

Beside him, Asami sat up. Dawn kept his eyes on the ring.

"Tonight, a showmatch for the ages! On this side—" the spotlight swung, a beam sweeping the far platform "—your reigning, undefeated, ever-so-humble champions — the White Falls WOLFBATS!"

The far end of the arena answered with a wall of noise, half cheer and half the good honest booing that a champion earns just by winning too much. Three figures rose up out of the shadow on their platform, arms lifted, soaking all of it in.

"And on this side—" the beam whipped back, and Dawn's pulse did something ahead of his thoughts, "—together again, for the first time since one of their own traded the ring for the badge and became one of Republic City's own brave officers of the law — back in their classic, beloved, iconic lineup — the FIRE. FERRETS!"

The roar that went up for them was louder. Not by protocol — by love. Dawn was on his feet before he'd decided to be, and so was Asami, and so was the entire near half of the stadium, and down on the platform three figures came up into the light.

He found her before the announcer said the name, before the spotlight even settled — found her the way he always did, first, without trying.

Korra.

She stood in the center of the three, helmet under one arm because of course it was, because putting it on before she absolutely had to was beneath her, and she was grinning up into the noise with her whole face. Mako on her right, arms crossed and pretending the reception was for the sport and not for him. Bolin on her left, both fists in the air, mouth already moving in some announcement of his own that no one would ever hear.

"Now, now — settle, settle." The announcer rode the crowd back down a notch. "You all know the drill, but the fine print, for the record. This is a showmatch, folks. No title on the line. No rankings, no purse, no knockouts to weep over. So to our competitors—" a theatrical pause, "—we're not here to see you win tonight. We're here to see you play. Give us the fancy stuff. Give us the shots you'd never risk with a belt on the table. Show these good people some pro-bending!"

The crowd ate it up. Somewhere below, Bolin took the invitation personally and did something with a disc that sent it spinning in a flat, showy arc back into the rack, purely to hear the noise it got him, and got it.

Dawn sat back down slowly. Asami came down beside him.

Korra rolled her shoulders once, loose, and finally — finally — pulled the helmet on. The grin vanished under the faceguard, and the woman who'd been laughing up at the cheap seats a second ago went still, and settled her weight.

The whistle went, and the ring came alive.

Dawn's mind slid down its familiar groove — the one that ran from Korra into the Avatar. A record played so many times it had worn smooth of its meaning. He waved it off. There weren't two of her. There was just her.

She opened with water, a whip pulled clean off the front grate, and she was loose with it. She snapped a low blast at the Wolfbats' waterbender's knees just to make him hop, and Dawn caught the tilt of her head under the faceguard that meant she was laughing. She was playing.

Bolin was no better. He caught a disc mid-air, ricocheted it off the side rope on purpose and it curled back to clip a Wolfbat in the shoulder. A shot no earthbender would spend two motions on with a belt on the table. The near half of the arena roared, and Bolin soaked it up.

Mako played it straight.

Dawn read it off him in one blink. The economy of a man holding the zone like it counted, feet set, every blast one clean orange second, nothing wasted. He'd eased off, some. A single wide arc of fire he didn't strictly need, thrown for the seats. But the reflex to win ran under everything he did.

Dawn leaned toward Asami. "Mako knows it's a showmatch?"

"He knows," she said.

Korra spun a Wolfbat back a zone, and the benches came up around them.

The green light flared at center, and Korra took the opening.

Two grates emptied at once under her pull, a surge of water she rode forward on her front foot, a whip in each hand. She cracked one across the lead Wolfbat's chest and the other under his boots in the same motion, and he went off the back of the ring in a spray, arms wheeling. She stood a half-beat in the vacated zone, chest heaving, water running off her gloves, and Dawn saw it — the tiny surplus of speed on that front foot, a hitch of air feathered under the step that wasn't in any waterbending form he'd catalogued. A little push.

Round one went blue. Round two, the Wolfbats clawed it back — Mako caught a bad angle on a disc and lost a zone, and the champions pressed it, and red lit the second tube. One apiece.

And then the third round turned. Both teams stopped taking territory and started giving the crowd its money. A Wolfbat spun three discs into a fan. Bolin answered by shattering all three in the air. Korra and the Wolfbat waterbender traded whips at half-force. Nobody pressed the advantage when it came. Nobody wanted to break it.

The final whistle caught them stalemated, even zones, even players, nothing gained on either side. And there would be no face-off. Not tonight. Showmatch rules. A draw stood as a draw.

The tubes lit for it and the arena came apart at the seams.

Down on the ring, six benders pulled their helmets off and met at the center line, and there was no winner to gloat and no loser to sulk — just handshakes, and the Wolfbats' captain clasping Mako's forearm, and Korra bowing to the champions with her fist to her palm, and them bowing back, low and real.

"And THERE it is, folks — a draw for the ages!" The announcer's voice rode over the roar, warm now, winding down. "Six of the best, one glorious night, and nobody goes home a loser! Give it up one more time — for the Wolfbats, and your Fire Ferrets! Drive safe, tip your cabbies, and good night, Republic City!"

The house-lights came up, and the bowl began to empty. Dawn stayed where he was a moment and let the current move around him. He liked the eavesdropping more than he'd expected to, the unguarded verdicts people handed each other on the way to the exits.

"—told you the girl had it, didn't I tell you—"

"—the little one, with the discs, did you see the—"

"—shame there's no face-off, I'd have paid double—"

Once the crowd thinned, he got up.

"Not that way," Asami said, turning. She jerked her chin down their row, to a plain grey door in the wall with no crowd in front of it. "This way."

"Yeah, right. Got carried away."

He followed. Asami pushed the door with her hip and the grey corridor beyond swallowed the arena noise down to a hum. Concrete, pipes overhead, the smell of wet rope and liniment.

The locker room door was propped open with a bench, and the sound coming out was Bolin's voice cresting over the top of everyone else's, pure victory-that-wasn't.

Dawn came around the frame, and there they were. Korra still half in her gear, hair plastered flat where the helmet had been, laughing at something Mako had said with her whole body. And Pabu, streaking a red line along Bolin's shoulders at the sight of new arrivals.

Korra saw him and crossed the room before he'd fully cleared the door, and Dawn met her halfway. She smelled of sweat and the faint mineral tang of the ring water, and she was still warm off the fight, radiating it. He kissed her, short, one hand finding the damp curve of her jaw. The grin she couldn't put away for even a second got in the way. His thumb found her knuckles without a decision on his part. He didn't decide most of what he did around her.

To his left, without ceremony, Asami leaned into Mako and kissed him, quick and familiar, her hand flat against his chest. Mako, granite-jawed Mako, let his shoulders drop and let her.

Which left Bolin.

Bolin clocked it. The two couples registered on his face in a fast bounce of the eyebrows. Bolin looked left. Bolin looked right. Then he plucked Pabu off his shoulder with both hands, held the fire ferret up to eye level, said, "Well, I'm not gonna be rude," and kissed him square on top of the head.

Pabu chirped, indignant.

The room came apart laughing. Korra doubled over against Dawn's arm, and Mako scoffed the short humorless scoff that was, from Mako, a full belly laugh, and even Asami's laugh got away from her, the real one that had been buried under the report all night.

"He started it," Bolin protested, setting Pabu back on his shoulder, entirely unrepentant. "He looked lonely. Somebody had to."

"He looks lonely because you kissed him," Mako said.

The laughter rolled through the room a second time and took the last of the night's weight with it.

Korra pulled back from his arm, wiping at her eyes, still riding high on the fight. "That was — okay, that was so good. Did you see the third round? Nobody wanted to end it. We could've gone all night."

"We saw," Dawn said. "You had a little extra on that front foot. First round. The step into the empty zone."

Her grin turned sideways, caught out and not sorry about it. "Maybe a little push. Here and there." She held her thumb and finger a hair apart. "Barely counts. It's not like there was a belt on the line."

"Cheater," Bolin said, delighted, from across the room.

"Showman," Korra corrected.

Mako was leaning against the lockers with his gear half-stripped and his arms crossing back into their default position. "It was the strategy that held it, though," Dawn said. "Round one, holding the zone like it mattered when nothing did. That's what kept it even. Nobody else on that ring was thinking two rounds ahead."

Mako's shoulder lifted. He didn't argue it. "Somebody has to."

"He'll take that," Korra said, jerking a thumb at Mako. "He's been waiting all night for somebody to notice."

"Not true," Mako said flatly, which meant thank you.

He was about to say something back when the propped door scraped, and a shape leaned in around the frame — green and gold, entirely too much gold — with the easy confidence of a man who had never once wondered whether he was welcome in a room.

"There they are," Rooni announced. "The heroes of the hour."

Rooni didn't fully commit to entering. He hung in the doorway with one shoulder against the frame. Behind him in the corridor, two girls hovered, and when Rooni half-turned toward them they lifted their hands and waved into the locker room, a bright flutter aimed at all of them and none of them.

Dawn nodded back, because it seemed rude not to.

"Bolin." Rooni ignored the rest of them. "My friend. My talent. What are you doing back here breathing liniment fumes with the working class?" He tipped his head down the corridor. "There's a car. There's a place. There's people who'd very much like to buy the pro-bender a drink. Come with us."

Bolin's grin held, but something moved behind it. Bolin's eyes cut, quick, to the girls in the doorway, then to the car that wasn't visible from here but that he was clearly picturing, and then — Dawn saw it — around the room. To Mako. To Korra. To Asami. To Pabu on his own shoulder.

The eyebrows climbed, wavered, came down.

For one honest second it was very close.

Bolin let out a breath and reached up to give Pabu a scratch under the chin.

"Nah," Bolin said. "Thanks, though. Really. But I've got my people right here." He gestured around the room with the open sweep of his arm. "This is kind of the whole point of the night."

Rooni absorbed the refusal without a flicker. If it stung — and Dawn doubted very much that it did — it never reached his face. He simply pushed off the doorframe and gave a little shrug.

"Your loss, pal," he said, cheerful and final, and he turned, drifting back toward the corridor and the two waving girls.

And then he was gone, the sound of his voice picking up again out in the concrete hall, pitched now for a fresh audience.

The room let a beat pass.

"Why," Mako said, to no one in particular, "do we still talk to him?"

"I've looked into it," Dawn said. "Genuinely. Ran it a few ways. I keep expecting to find a reason underneath." He shook his head slowly. "There isn't one. I've checked. It just doesn't exist."

"And yet," Asami said.

"And yet." He shrugged. "The math doesn't close, and I've made my peace with that."

Korra snorted, then pulled her damp hair back off her neck and blew out a breath. "Okay. Great match, love you all, but—" she pointed a thumb toward the corridor and the lot beyond it, "—Naga's been out there for two hours. She's either asleep or she's eating somebody's satomobile. Only two options. We should go before we find out which."

That broke the room up into motion — Bolin scooping Pabu properly onto his shoulder, Mako pushing off the lockers to gather the last of his gear. Dawn watched the good easy chaos and let himself enjoy it for exactly as long as it lasted.

"Tomorrow," Asami said to him, pulling her jacket straight. "Facility. Early. We're taking that housing apart before either of us has had the chance to feel clever about anything."

"Early," Dawn agreed. "I'll bring hot tea. You can bring your accusations, if you want."

"I'll have a list."

"Of course." He turned to Mako, who gave him a short nod that carried more than the gesture, and Dawn returned it in kind. To Bolin: "The kiss was the highlight of the evening. Genuinely."

"It was for Pabu too," Bolin said gravely.

Korra tugged his sleeve, pulling him toward the door. Behind him Asami called something to Mako about a ride, and Bolin said something about food, and the sound followed him out.

* * *

Naga slowed on the path above the bay and stopped herself without being told, planting her feet where the lantern-light from the temple reached the sand. The night had gone soft and warm out here over the water, the wind off the bay carrying salt and cut grass instead of the city's iron.

Air Temple Island was tranquil. As always.

Dawn swung his leg over, dropped, and felt the give of the sand come up through his boots after a night of concrete.

Korra came down beside him, landing lighter, and gave Naga a solid open-palmed slap along the ribs.

"Okay, girl. Off you go." She scratched the spot she'd just smacked. "You know where the food is."

Naga did not move. The great head swung around to Dawn instead, one dark eye finding him with the patience of a creditor who knew exactly where her debtor slept.

"I know," he said. "A promise is a promise." From inside the coat he brought out the salt-dried fish he'd bought off a cart outside the arena — wrapped in paper, nearly the length of his forearm. He'd weighed the photograph against the debt. The debt had won.

Naga took it from his open hands with a delicacy nothing her size had any right to, and the tail swept once, high and final — account closed.

Then she turned, a great pale shape folding away into the dark toward the stables and, more importantly, the bins — because one fish, at her scale, was a rounding error.

He knew with dead certainty that in less than an hour Naga would get into Korra's room through the window — with all the stealth of a rockslide — and settle to sleep there, occupying half the space.

He looked up at the temple, its windows still lit this late. Calling it 'home' still felt oddly wrong.

They walked up the steps without talking. The stone was cool through his boots, the lanterns strung along the path throwing warm pools between long stretches of dark, and Korra kept a half-step ahead of him with a loose, spent gait. He matched it. The quiet between them was the good kind.

They reached the top and stepped out onto the plaza, and the temple's main door cracked open.

Ikki's head appeared around the edge, a small orange blur that resolved into wide grey eyes. She clocked them across the plaza in about a quarter of a second.

"They're here!" she bellowed back into the house, at a volume that could have carried to the far shore. Then she was out and coming, feet barely brushing the stone, robes flapping. "Daaaaawn! He broke it!"

Behind her the door slammed the rest of the way open with a bang and a shove of air, and Meelo stood framed in the light, planted, fists on his hips, chin up.

"No I did NOT!" Meelo roared. "She's lying! She did it!"

"No YOU did it," Ikki shouted over her shoulder without slowing, "I SAW you did it!"

She arrived at speed. Dawn had exactly enough warning to set his weight before she braked, heels skidding, coming up a hand's width short of running straight into his hip. Up close she vibrated with the news. From somewhere in the folds of her robes she produced her evidence and thrust it up at him with both hands.

The toy flier. The one he'd carved a few weeks back, light-grained wood shaved down thin enough to catch the air. Then he registered the damage: the tail assembly hung off the fuselage at a wrong angle, the little joint he'd fitted there split clean through, the rear third separated and holding on by a single splinter.

Beside him he felt Korra go still, and heard, very quietly, the beginning of a laugh she was choosing to smother.

"I made it fly, like usual!" Meelo announced, and launched. A gust punched off his heels and he came across the plaza in a low airbending arc, landing square between the two of them with a whump that sent every loose hair on all four of them flying sideways. Dawn's hood lifted off his shoulders and settled crooked. "The tree was just in the way!"

Dawn crouched, so he was level with the two of them, and took the broken flier gently out of Ikki's grip. It weighed almost nothing. He turned the split joint toward the lantern-light, and the fracture told him plainly it had met the tree considerably faster than any glide would explain.

"Okay," Dawn said. "I can't fix this one."

Two small faces started to fold at the same time, Ikki's mouth opening on some appeal, Meelo's brow crumpling into the front edge of a wail.

"But," he said, fast, before either of them could commit to disaster. "I'll make a new one. A whole new one." He looked from Ikki to Meelo and back, letting it land. "One for each of you."

That stopped it cold. Both faces reorganized on the spot, grief swapped out for something brighter.

"But," Dawn went on, holding up one finger, "then whoever breaks theirs is responsible for it. That's the deal. Yes?"

"Deal!" Meelo barked, and snapped a salute so crisp it puffed air across Dawn's collar.

"Only if he keeps his hands off mine!" Ikki said, jabbing a finger at her brother.

"I will!"

"No you will not."

"I will —"

He filed the woodwork under tomorrow, after the housing. Somewhere behind him Korra had given up and was letting the laugh out low.

The porch light shifted. Pema had come to the door, and there was a bundle against her shoulder: Rohan, small and asleep and blessedly unbothered by the racket his siblings were making, one hand cupped under him, the other braced on the doorframe.

"Kids." Her voice didn't rise. It dropped, and both children snapped their mouths shut on whatever they'd been about to shout next. "Stop shouting. It's already well past bedtime." She looked past them, and the sternness eased into something warmer. "Hi, Korra. Hi, Dawn." A tired smile. "How was the match?"

"Draw," Korra said, and even the word came out grinning. "No face-off, showmatch rules. Should've seen the third round, Pema — nobody wanted to win. We just kept going." She spread her hands wide, like the match was still happening somewhere behind her. "It was perfect."

"That sounds nice," Pema said, and stepped back to let them through, angling her shoulder so the sleeping bundle stayed clear of the doorframe.

The kids went first, of course — Ikki and Meelo pouring past her knees and into the warmth in a tangle of orange, their argument dropping to a hiss the instant they crossed the threshold, then abandoned entirely for the more urgent business of getting inside. Dawn followed with Korra, ducking under the low lintel, and the night air gave way to lamplight and the smell of steeped tea.

The main room was quiet and warm. Tenzin sat at the short table with a cup between his hands, and Jinora beside him with her own, small and composed, her eyes lifting to the door before anyone spoke. Around the two of them Ikki and Meelo were already orbiting the table.

Pema crossed and lowered herself down beside her husband.

"Korra. Dawn." Tenzin inclined his head to each of them. His voice was even and courteous, offering the welcome plainly and, Dawn had long since learned to hear, exactly to its edges and no further. "You're back late."

"Master Tenzin," Dawn said, and returned the nod, measured, matching the register precisely. Then he side-eyed Korra. "It's entirely her fault."

"Not true!" Korra shot back, and Dawn caught the exact pitch. Meelo's outrage, note for note, from a woman three times his height. She didn't seem to hear the echo. "It went long because it was good. That's not the same as being late. Not one of us wanted to call it. Ask anyone."

The collective guilt of six benders, apparently. Dawn kept his face neutral.

"Sit," Tenzin said, lifting the pot. "There's tea."

"Pass," Korra said, already backing toward the inner hall. "Love you, mean it, but I'm going to stand under hot water until I can't feel my own legs and then I'm going to lie down and die. In that order. Goodnight, everybody."

"Thank you, no," Dawn said, and meant it more precisely — the pot was tempting, the warmth of the room was tempting, but the morning was against him. "Early start at the facility. Asami has a list of my failures she's very excited to read aloud." He nodded to the table. "Goodnight."

He turned for the men's wing. Korra turned for the women's, the two of them peeling apart across the room the way the island's geography insisted they always did after dark. A small nightly injustice he never protested.

"Wait."

Tenzin's voice. Not sharp, but it stopped Dawn mid-step, and he turned back. Tenzin had set down his cup and risen, crossing to a shelf near the door, and when he came back he held a single envelope.

"This came for you today." He held it out, and his eyes went from Dawn to Korra and back. "For both of you."

Dawn's gaze cut to Korra across the room. She'd stopped too. She met his eyes, and a short nervous laugh got out of her.

They both came back. Korra crossed the room to stand at his shoulder, close, but she made no move for the envelope — her hands stayed at her sides. So he took it.

The envelope was good paper and seemed heavier than it needed to be. Four words on the front in a hand he'd have known anywhere, drawn out and even, no wasted motion:

To: Korra and Dawn.

His stomach tightened.

He worked a thumb under the flap and tore it open along the end, a small ragged sound too loud in this room, and heard Korra pull in a sharp breath beside him, held it. He drew out what was inside. A single sheet, folded once. He unfolded it.

In the top left corner, in small precise letters, cramped as if she'd been rationing space:

I have an idea. Come as soon as you can.

And below it, sprawling down and across two-thirds of the sheet, an enormous ornate signature — loops and flourishes ballooning off every letter, the tail of the last one whipping clear to the bottom edge of the page — the whole thing a theatrical monument built for one purpose, which was to be looked at:

Dusk.