Chapter II: Leaf in the Wind
The newspaper rustled.
Korra turned a page with the focused attention of someone who had found something infinitely more interesting than whatever was currently on her plate, and the headline stared back at her in bold block letters:
FIRE FERRETS CLINCH SEMIFINAL BERTH IN STUNNING COMEBACK — MAKO CARRIES TEAM ON HIS BACK AGAIN
Beneath it, a grainy photograph of the arena mid-match, frozen at the precise moment some poor earthbender was being launched over the ring's edge with extreme prejudice. She traced the image with one finger, the way other people might trace the lines of a map to somewhere they'd always wanted to go.
"—and that's precisely why I find it so troubling."
Tenzin's voice pulled her back to the breakfast table.
"The footwork alone is a corruption of foundational earthbending principles," he continued, pouring his tea with the careful deliberateness of a man who considered everything he did to be a teachable moment. "These athletes reduce the sacred practice of bending — centuries of spiritual philosophy made physical — to a spectator sport. For entertainment." He said the last word the way other people said pest infestation.
"That's..." Korra searched briefly for a diplomatic response and mostly failed. "I mean — did you see what that firebender did in the last round? He was backed up against the edge with three opponents, and he just—" She made an explosive gesture with both hands.
"Yes," Tenzin said. "I didn't."
Korra opened her mouth.
Then the table shook.
It was subtle at first — a faint tremor that rattled the teacups in their saucers and sent a ripple across the surface of the soup pot — and Tenzin frowned, the way he frowned at all unexpected things, which was with the particular focus of a man cataloguing a problem for later resolution. The two White Lotus sentries stationed outside exchanged a glance and moved to investigate, hands raised.
The tremor became a vibration. The vibration became a rumble. And the rumble became something that sent Tenzin's chair scraping back from the table as he rose and moved, with quiet urgency, toward the door.
Korra was already past him.
She stepped out into the morning air, looked up, and stopped.
"Tenzin." Her voice had gone very still. "Look up there. It's Winter and Tohra."
She pointed.
Tenzin looked up.
His jaw did not quite hit the ground, but it made a credible attempt.
High above Air Temple Island, perhaps three hundred feet over the water, two figures burned against the pale morning sky like twin stars someone had knocked loose from their moorings. The auras that wreathed them were impossible to mistake — blazing halos of concentrated energy that lit the cloud cover from below and sent long, dramatic shadows racing across the bay. They moved with the fluid, instinctive violence of two people who had been sparring together since before they could remember, which was to say: beautifully, and with complete disregard for the structural integrity of the surrounding atmosphere.
"GIANT ERASER FLASH!"
The shout carried clearly even from this distance. A shaft of emerald light lanced downward from Tohra's outstretched palm — laser was the only honest word for it — blazing and clean and absolutely not anything that belonged in an earthly sky.
"GALICK CANNON!"
Winter's answer came a half-second later: an enormous wave of violet energy that unfolded like a breaking wave and swallowed the emerald beam whole. The collision point between them detonated with a thunderclap that flattened the grass across the entire island and sent every bird within a half-mile radius into panicked, screaming flight.
Tenzin watched the explosion bloom and fade above the water.
He watched it for a long moment.
Then, slowly, the two figures descended through the lingering smoke — auras guttering out, breathing hard, cut and bruised in the particular way of people who have been hitting each other very hard for a very long time and consider this a completely normal Tuesday morning. By the time their feet touched the ground, they had already begun the unconscious process of cataloguing each other's damage: Winter pressing two fingers briefly to a cut above Tohra's eye, Tohra rolling a shoulder that had taken the edge of the Galick Cannon and finding it functional enough.
They looked up.
Found the entire household staring at them.
Winter's nervous smile arrived precisely three seconds before any coherent response could form.
"😅 Oh... hey there."
She waved.
Tenzin thought, in the resounding silence that followed: Light benders. That was the category that made the most sense, the one he'd settled on when he first saw Winter discharge that orb in the street. Light benders were rare — genuinely, legendarily rare — and he had never personally met one before coming to the police station two days ago. He had not, he was now realizing, fully appreciated what rare implied about their capabilities.
He was revising his estimates upward.
Rapidly.
Ikki and Meelo, unencumbered by adult notions of appropriate reactions, solved the silence problem with characteristic efficiency.
"THAT WAS AWESOME!"
They streaked across the grass like bolts of silk-robed lightning, skidding to a halt directly in front of the two saiyans with eyes like polished dinner plates.
"Can you teach us how to do that?!" Ikki demanded, grabbing Winter's sleeve with both hands. "Can you? Please say you can! Can you? Can you? Can you?"
Winter held up both hands in the universal gesture of a person trying to stop a river with their palms. Her eyes cut sideways to Tenzin with the expression of someone who has just discovered they need adult supervision.
"What should I tell them, Master Tenzin?" she said, dropping her voice. "They are your kids, after all."
Tenzin gathered himself, smoothed his robes, and addressed his youngest two with the patient authority of a man who had done this particular dance many times before.
"Now, now. Ikki, Meelo — you mustn't pressure Miss Winter. She has her own training to focus on."
Two faces fell in near-perfect synchrony.
Winter looked at them. At their deflated expressions. At the way Meelo's lower lip jutted forward with the structural precision of a very small emotional weapon.
She reached out and ruffled both their heads gently.
"Don't worry about it, you two," she said. "I'm sure we can figure out something I can teach you. Just... give it a little time."
Both children bounced back like spring-loaded things.
As the group began to drift back toward the morning's scheduled business, Korra fell into step beside the others and found herself, not for the first time, watching Tohra from the corner of her eye.
There was something about him.
She couldn't name it. It wasn't threatening, exactly — though he was, objectively speaking, enormous, and the ki blast she'd watched him fire had left a scorch mark on the underside of a cloud. It was more like... a feeling. The same low hum of instinct that told her when a storm was coming, or when the ground wanted to move. Something in the universe asserting: this matters. Pay attention.
She filed it away.
She'd figure it out eventually.
She always did.
The wind gates stood at the edge of a wide stone courtyard, their wooden arms interlocked in an elegant puzzle of perpetual motion. Tenzin had set them spinning before the lesson began, and they turned now with the unhurried authority of something that had been turning for a very long time and expected to keep doing so indefinitely.
He released the leaf.
It was a small, green, completely ordinary leaf — and it threaded the spinning gates like water through reeds, turning and dipping and adjusting its course with a grace so effortless it barely registered as movement at all.
"The key," Tenzin said, watching it go, "is to be like the leaf. Air bending is all about shifting your balance. Reading the space. Being able to change direction at a moment's notice." He turned. "Jinora — would you demonstrate?"
Jinora nodded and moved to the gates with quiet confidence. She passed through them the way her father had described: balanced, responsive, every adjustment small and precise, her feet never quite still and never quite committed to any one position. She emerged from the other side without a single strike.
Korra watched with the focused expression of someone who had already decided how they were going to do this.
Tenzin recognized the expression.
He opened his mouth.
"Alright," Korra said. "Let's do this."
She charged.
What followed was not, technically speaking, a failure — in the sense that things happened, and some of them were even bending-related. But the spinning gates registered the intrusion of Korra's direct, determined, extremely committed approach the way a river registers a thrown rock: with immediate, enthusiastic, and total opposition. The first arm caught her across the shoulder. The second clipped her shin. The third — she tried ducking; the fourth came from below; the fifth arrived from an angle she was absolutely certain hadn't been there a moment ago — and then she was tumbling back out the entrance in a tangle of limbs and braids and wounded dignity, coming to rest on the stone in a heap.
A beat of silence.
"...Okay." Korra sat up, rubbing her arm. "Maybe not like that."
"Perhaps," said a voice from the side, "you'd like to see what Master Tenzin actually means?"
Winter stepped forward, rolling her shoulders with the loose ease of someone who had already done several hundred feet of aerial combat this morning and considered the spin cycle of a few wooden gates a comparatively relaxing warm-up. She looked at her brother, who was standing a few feet back with his arms folded.
"Tohra — if you wouldn't mind?"
He uncrossed one arm, extended his palm, and exhaled.
The wave of energy was gentle by his standards — a kiai breath, a focused displacement of air that pressed outward from his hand with the controlled precision of someone who had learned, over many years, that most problems did not require a laser. The gates picked up the gust and spun faster, smoothly, without breaking rhythm.
Winter closed her eyes.
"The key," she said, settling into her stance, "is not to force your way through. You're too used to attacking problems directly, Korra. Head-on, full power, maximum commitment — I understand the instinct, I really do. But the gates don't care how strong you are. They'll hit you just as hard whether you're the most powerful bender in the world or the least." She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice had taken on the unhurried quality of someone working through a thought in real-time.
"What you're looking for is the moment just before you're about to be hit. Not after — before. Your feet know the difference before your eyes do, if you let them. Feel that moment, shift your weight, adjust your angle — just barely, just enough — and then move on to the next gate. Don't think about the one two ahead. Don't think about the ones behind you. Just this gate. Just this moment."
She moved.
Eyes still closed.
The gates spun. The arms swept through their arcs with the programmed indifference of something that had struck down everyone who'd ever stood in front of it. And Winter walked through them the way the leaf had — not by fighting the motion, not by predicting it with any visible effort, but by inhabiting the spaces between things with an ease that looked, from the outside, less like skill and more like the gates simply chose not to hit her.
She stepped out the other side, opened her eyes, and turned around.
Jinora's hands were clasped over her mouth in delight. Ikki and Meelo were making sounds usually reserved for athletic victories. Even Tenzin found himself arrested mid-thought, turning something over in his mind with the expression of a man who has just discovered an unexpected footnote in a book he thought he knew by heart.
A non-bender, he thought. Threading the gates on feel alone.
How extraordinarily odd.
Korra stood at the gates' entrance and looked at the path Winter had just walked, and something in her expression shifted — moved from frustrated combat-readiness toward something quieter. Thoughtful.
She glanced at Tohra.
He met her eyes and nodded. Once.
She waited for the meaning of the nod to arrive, and it didn't quite, because Tohra was not, by nature, an expressively verbose communicator.
Winter appeared at his elbow.
"Tohra." Her voice was patient in the particular way of someone who had been having the same patient conversation for a very long time. "We talked about this. She's never going to understand what you're saying if you just nod at her. You can trust Korra — she and the others are our friends. Talk to her."
A long pause.
Tohra turned to Korra. There was something effortful about the way he assembled words sometimes, like someone carefully constructing something precise from components that didn't always cooperate.
"Go... on, Korra," he said. "Use the way... my sister showed you."
It wasn't much. But Korra found, unexpectedly, that it was enough. She turned back to the gates.
She didn't ask any questions. She just walked forward, and this time, she listened.
Later, with the morning's formal training concluded, Winter fell into step beside Tenzin as the group dispersed toward the midday meal.
"Master Tenzin. Could I ask you a favor?"
He slowed. "Certainly."
She chose her words with the same care Tohra chose his — but for different reasons. Tohra found words difficult; Winter, Tenzin was beginning to understand, found unnecessary words distasteful.
"I'd like your permission to keep an eye on Korra. Unofficially." She paused. "She's unlike any avatar I've ever heard of. Which means her behavior is going to be unpredictable. I have a feeling she's going to try something that will make us all wish someone had been watching."
Tenzin considered this.
"...I can't say you're wrong," he said.
"It would also ease Tohra's mind." She glanced over toward where her brother stood, watching Korra attempt to demonstrate earthbending for Jinora with an expression that was simultaneously impassive and quietly attentive. "He's concerned about her. He met her three days ago, and he's already concerned about her."
Tenzin followed her gaze.
Something shifted in his expression — not surprise exactly, but the particular warmth of a teacher who has just heard something about a student that makes him happy.
"Very well," he said. "I'll leave her to the two of you."
Winter bowed slightly — not a full bow, but the fractional inclination of the head that acknowledged respect without performing submission — and turned back toward the group.
Tenzin watched her go.
Winter and Tohra, he thought. Who — or rather, what — are you two?
He didn't have an answer.
He suspected he wouldn't for some time.
The evening came down warm and amber over Air Temple Island, painting the pagoda steps in long orange stripes.
Korra stood alone in the training courtyard and glared at the empty air.
"Come on." She brought her hands up in the initiating stance Tenzin had shown her. "Airbend."
The air did nothing.
"Airbend."
Nothing.
"Airbend! GAH!" She dropped her hands. "What is wrong with me?! I've been trying all day — I've tried the breathing, I've tried the footwork, I've tried doing it Jinora's way, and it just — it doesn't — nothing happens!"
The tirade was building toward something spectacular when a thin thread of sound reached her on the breeze.
A radio. The White Lotus sentries on the outer terrace had one going low, and through the evening air she caught the distant, static-edged voice of the pro bending announcer climbing toward a crescendo:
"—and Mako of the Fire Ferrets is the last one standing, folks, backed up to the edge with all three opponents bearing down on him — this looks like it could be the end of their run, but the firebender has dropped into that familiar stance of his — folks, I've seen him do this before, and if you know what that means, you'd better hold onto your seats—"
She drifted toward the sound without fully deciding to.
"—because WHAT a reversal! Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot believe what I'm watching—"
Click.
Korra looked up.
Tenzin stood at the radio's side with the expression of a man who has made a decision and intends to stand by it.
"Korra," he said calmly. "Come down here."
She climbed down from the wall's edge with the particular energy of someone choosing, very deliberately, not to express what they were actually feeling.
"You turned it off at the best part."
"And as I've mentioned, a calm and quiet environment is essential for—"
"You said I couldn't watch it. You never said anything about listening."
Tenzin closed his eyes briefly.
"That," he said, "is beside the point. I forbid you from concerning yourself with that... that rubbish, Korra. The teachings of air bending require your complete focus, and that sport is a—"
"A mockery of the sacred art of bending, yes." She turned away. "I know."
She walked.
What's so wrong about it? she thought, scuffing her foot against the stone. What is it that he can't just—
She didn't have an answer. The evening settled around her, indifferent.
Morning found them in the pagoda.
Six figures arranged in a rough circle, legs crossed, eyes closed — or attempting closed. The incense burned. The wind moved through the open screens with meditative regularity. Jinora sat as she always sat: grounded, unhurried, present. Ikki maintained a valiant attempt for approximately forty seconds before losing her battle with something she'd just remembered about a bug she'd seen yesterday. Meelo, simply and completely, fell asleep.
Korra lasted the longest before opening her eyes.
"I think I'm doing it wrong."
"There's nothing to do," Tenzin said, without opening his. "Simply breathe. Air is the element of freedom."
Korra stared at the incense smoke. "Freedom," she said. "The element of freedom — and I'm not allowed to leave the island, not allowed to listen to the radio, not allowed to—"
"Korra."
"I'm just saying! None of this makes any—" She stopped.
Beside her, Tohra floated six inches off the ground.
The emerald aura had emerged without fanfare, without intention — a soft, steady radiance that moved through the air around him like breath, like something he simply was when he wasn't actively being something else. His expression hadn't changed. His eyes were still closed. He hadn't noticed.
Winter, one position over, had noticed. She had, in fact, noticed approximately thirty seconds ago and had been waiting with the patient resignation of someone watching a situation develop that she has watched develop many times before.
She reached over and poked him in the ribs.
One dark eye cracked open.
"Tohra." Her voice was a murmur. "You're doing it again. Everyone's staring."
He looked around. Tenzin was staring. Jinora was staring. Ikki had forgotten entirely about the bug. Even Meelo had woken up.
The aura retracted like a tide going out. Tohra settled back to the ground with the quiet thud of someone who has done something embarrassing and is choosing to process it internally.
Winter rubbed the back of her head with an expression of deeply apologetic mortification.
"S-Sorry about that, Master Tenzin. I'll — explain. At a later time."
Tenzin looked at Winter. Looked at Tohra. Looked at the faint emerald afterglow still dissipating in the pagoda's air.
"Very well," he said, in the tone of a man adding a very large item to a very long list. "Miss Winter — I will hold you to that." He paused. "And Korra — the teachings may not make sense today. But one day, they will simply... click."
Korra watched the empty air where Tohra's aura had been.
That definitely wasn't normal, she thought. No bending makes light like that. No bending makes that.
She watched Tohra settle back into his meditation with the settled patience of someone who had been doing this since long before she was born, and the low hum of instinct that had been following her since that first morning on the island repeated itself, patient and unhurried:
This matters. Pay attention.
What are you, Tohra?
She was going to find out.
That evening, she decided not to wait for airbending to click.
She checked the window first. The White Lotus sentries made their rounds with the dependable rhythm of people who had never, in their experience, had a ward attempt to actually escape. She timed the gap. Found it. Slipped through the shadows to the island's edge, hit the water without a splash, and was twenty meters out before her feet found the surface with the easy confidence of a lifelong waterbender.
The city glittered across the bay.
She set her course and moved.
Above her, in the dark, a figure with a black tail shifted against the stars.
Tohra watched the small shape moving across the water toward the distant lights of the arena district, and a faint sound escaped him — not quite a sigh, but the exhalation of someone whose prediction has proven entirely correct. He glanced sideways.
Winter hovered beside him, arms folded, expression entirely unsurprised.
"Told you," she said, without inflection.
"We should follow," Tohra said. "Korra... could get into trouble."
"You know—" Winter glanced at him sidelong— "most people would just let the avatar make her own mistakes."
A pause.
"We should follow," Tohra repeated.
Winter smiled — the quick, genuine kind, not the composed kind she used for people she didn't entirely trust yet.
"Yeah," she said. "We probably should."
Their ki ignited, twin columns of light briefly painting the water below, and then they were gone — two shooting stars angled toward the city's glow.
The Pro Bending Arena was, on a match night, exactly as Korra had imagined it: loud, bright, and operating on a frequency that resonated somewhere in the center of her chest.
She surfaced outside the arena's lower wall and found an open window — second floor, narrow, clearly designed for ventilation rather than entry, but Korra had always been of the opinion that a window large enough for one's head was large enough for the rest. She used a thread of waterbending to launch herself through, landed on the interior walkway, and executed a quick spinning motion that peeled the water off her clothes and hair and deposited it in a neat spiral on the floor. Practical. Efficient.
Then she walked directly into Tohra.
She took a step back. He was very large, and she had walked into him with considerable commitment.
"What the— Tohra?!"
He nodded, in the patient way of someone whose presence here required no explanation, because the explanation had always been obvious.
A moment later, Winter materialized from around the corner with the easy composure of someone who had not just flown across a bay in the dark.
"We knew you'd try something crazy." She tilted her head. "We didn't think you'd be this crazy, but here we are." Her expression warmed by a fraction as she glanced at her brother. "Besides — a certain someone was concerned."
Korra opened her mouth.
"Don't worry," Winter continued smoothly. "We're not telling Tenzin. As far as he knows, we're here because we said we'd keep an eye on you." A beat. "Which we are. It just turns out 'keeping an eye on you' required crossing a bay at eleven o'clock at night, so."
Korra exhaled with considerable relief.
The gym was two doors down — a wide, high-ceilinged space that smelled of sweat and canvas and old chalk, its walls lined with equipment racks and training posters and a pegboard scoreboard tracking team standings. It was also, in a way that immediately made Korra feel slightly more at home than she'd felt anywhere in the past week, full of people who were taking the business of hitting things very seriously.
An older man with the bearing of someone who had been irritated professionally for most of his adult life materialized in front of them before they'd taken five steps.
"Hey! What do you three think you're doing in here?!"
"Oh!" Korra's smile arrived with the practiced speed of someone who had talked themselves out of trouble many times before. "Sorry, sir — my friends and I were looking for the bathroom and we just kind of ended up getting turned around—"
The old man's eyes moved past her. They traveled from Korra to Winter to Tohra, and at Tohra they stopped, made a brief reassessment of several prior assumptions, and blinked.
He cleared his throat.
"Ahem. Right. The 'looking for the bathroom' excuse, is it." He crossed his arms with diminishing conviction. "Listen — I don't care who you three are. I am tired of young people using this gym without paying the entry fee—"
"Oh, there you guys are!"
The voice came from the gym's upper doorway, where a solidly built teenager in red training pads was descending the stairs two at a time with the relieved energy of someone who had just found a solution to a problem he didn't previously know he had.
He was broad-faced and cheerful, with black hair that stuck up at odd angles and green eyes that skipped rapidly between the three newcomers and the increasingly uncertain gym manager.
"I've been looking everywhere for you guys," Bolin said.
"They're with me," he added, to the old man.
"We're with him," Korra confirmed.
"We're together," Bolin elaborated.
"Not together together," Korra specified.
"Oh yeah! Together as in friends!" He turned to Tohra with the slightly cautious energy of someone who has just measured a doorframe and is reconsidering their furniture. "Right? We're friends. Big guy?"
Tohra regarded this teenager — this cheerful stranger who had just inserted himself into a situation for their benefit with zero prior acquaintance and complete confidence — and reached a quiet internal conclusion.
"...What my friend here says is true," he said. "My sister, myself, and our two friends here got lost on the way to the bathroom." He turned toward the door with the gravity of someone wrapping up a formal negotiation. "We're sorry to have troubled you, sir. We'll be on our way."
The old man stared at him.
"Yeah, whatever," he said, with the deflated authority of someone who has lost the initiative and knows it. "Just get out of my gym, alright?"
What followed was the best view of anything Korra had seen since arriving in Republic City.
Bolin led them to a high balcony overlooking the main ring — the full arena spread below them like a map of something alive, its lights blazing, its crowd already loud and warm and anticipatory. The ring itself was a masterwork of applied engineering: three zones per side, water cannons at the edges, a long drop to the pool below for those who couldn't maintain their footing. Suspended above it all, the announcer's box pulsed with the contained excitement of someone who got paid to be the loudest person in the room.
Korra grabbed the railing with both hands and leaned forward.
"This place is awesome."
"It's impressive," Winter agreed, resting her elbows on the rail with the measured appreciation of someone who had seen impressive things before and was being honest rather than effusive.
"Not as big as places... we've trained in," Tohra said. "But." He paused with the manner of someone searching for the right word. "It has... something."
"Atmosphere," Winter supplied.
He nodded. "Atmosphere."
"Name's Bolin, by the way," Bolin offered.
Korra shook his hand with the directness of someone who had decided immediately that she liked this person. "Korra."
"Winter." She extended her hand with the precise, measured firmness of someone who had been taught exactly how much pressure to apply.
Tohra looked at the offered hand and then at Bolin's face, where there was nothing but open, uncomplicated friendliness, and extended his own hand in return.
"Nice... to meet you, Bolin," he said, with the effortful care of someone making sure each word landed correctly.
Which was precisely when a voice from the upper doorway said:
"Bolin — how many times do I have to tell you? You can't just bring your fan girls up here while we're preparing for—"
The voice stopped.
The owner of the voice stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and his jacket open over his red-and-gold training uniform, taking in the scene on the balcony. He was lean and sharp-featured, with the posture of someone who had been carrying responsibility since before he was old enough to define the word, and dark eyes that catalogued everything they fell on with professional precision.
Those eyes landed on Winter.
Winter met them with the unhurried composure of someone who was accustomed to being looked at and had long since ceased to find it informative.
"Oh?" She tilted her head. "Something wrong, tough guy? Never seen a girl with a tail before?"
Her tail — the liquid-black one that moved with its own conversational vocabulary — flicked at her side as if punctuating the question.
Mako stared at her for a moment longer than he'd intended to.
He scowled. Turned. The match was coming up, and he had actual things to focus on.
"Fire Ferrets," Bolin supplied to the group, with the affectionate pride of someone naming his family. "That's my brother, Mako. He's usually..." He considered. "He's usually like that."
The match was, in technical terms, a very near thing.
The first round did not go well for the Fire Ferrets. Their opponents were disciplined and quick, and they pushed Mako's team back with the controlled efficiency of a squad that had done its preparation. Korra watched from above with her hands wrapped around the balcony rail, the muscles in her forearms tightening every time one of Mako's teammates got pushed back a zone.
The second round evened the score — barely. The Fire Ferrets ground out a win on the back of Bolin's earthbending and Mako's refusal to yield even a half-step more ground than was absolutely taken from him by force.
And then the third.
Bolin went down early, tumbling over the edge with a surprised expression and a splash. Their waterbender — caught out of position — followed not long after. And that left Mako, sole Fire Ferret standing, his heels at the ring's last centimeter, three opponents pressing forward, the crowd making the noise that crowds make when they're watching something that could go either way.
He dropped into his stance.
Korra leaned forward until her chin was practically over the rail.
What happened next was the kind of thing that happened when a person was not operating on technique alone, but on something older — the distilled product of years of practice at the edge of necessity, the muscle-memory of someone who had learned to fight because the alternative was not eating. Mako's fire came out fast and clean and precise, each burst calculated to the inch, each step forward a territorial claim he had no intention of surrendering. One opponent went over. Then another. The third dug in, planted his feet, matched fire with earth — and was met with a patience that was functionally indistinguishable from ferocity until the final moment, when Mako shifted his weight and put everything remaining into a single, conclusive strike.
The third opponent hit the water.
The crowd exploded.
"I don't believe it, folks! What a miraculous comeback! The Fire Ferrets have secured their spot in the pro bending tournament!"
Korra bounced on her heels, threw both fists in the air, and made a sound that contributed meaningfully to the overall noise level of the building. Tohra watched from beside her, and something in his expression — not demonstrative, but present and warm in the way that things which don't show themselves often are — softened into the faint shape of a smile.
She looked like that, he thought. Happy. Like someone who'd found a window after being in a room too long.
He was glad.
Across the balcony, Winter watched the scene in the ring below where Mako stood catching his breath while his waterbender came back up the access ramp already building toward an argument. Her eyes moved between them with the calm attention of someone reading a text she'd seen variations of before.
"What?" Mako said, noticing her looking.
"Nothing." She didn't look away. "Teammate trouble. He's arguing about execution, you're arguing about results, and neither of you is listening to the other because you're both still in match-mind." A slight pause. "You were going to tell him what you needed to change so this doesn't happen again. He didn't want to hear it."
Mako stared at her.
There was a long silence of the specific type that occurs when someone has accurately described a private situation with the confident ease of a person reading from notes they shouldn't have.
"...How did you even—"
"Cat got your tongue, tough guy?" The corner of her mouth lifted slightly.
Mako scowled. He turned away toward the locker room. He would process this later. He had many things to process.
The gym, an hour after the match:
The space had quieted down to the post-victory hum of people who had exerted themselves significantly and were now doing the things that came after — wiping equipment down, reviewing notes, stretching out the evening's damage. Bolin had somehow acquired Korra and was teaching her the earthbending stance with the genuine enthusiasm of someone who loved his sport and wanted to share that love with everyone he met.
Mako stood at the gym's edge, watching without appearing to watch, the way he always watched things he was still making his mind up about.
Winter stood beside him.
"You know," Mako said, after a while, "you don't have to stand there."
"I know," she said.
He glanced at her. "You're staring at something."
"I'm watching Korra," she said. "And your brother. I find people interesting when they're relaxed."
He didn't have an answer for that, so he didn't give one.
Below them, Korra launched a pair of earth disks into the net with precise power, and Bolin made a noise of impressed commentary:
"Good power! But in a real match you'd be a sitting Turtle Duck. Keep your weight balanced and upright — right up until the moment you're ready to strike, then — pa pow!" He demonstrated, bouncing lightly from one foot to the other with the rhythmic ease of someone who had done this so many times it had become play.
Korra mirrored the stance — crouched, found her center, came up on the balls of her feet, weight perfectly distributed.
Bolin's face lit up.
"Nice adjustment! You're a natural at this." He blinked. "I never would've thought you could earthbend from the whole... water tribe look. Sorry, that was — I didn't mean to assume—"
"No, you're right," Korra said, crossing her arms with the relaxed confidence of a person about to deliver information they know will land. "I'm a waterbender and an earthbender. Oh — and a firebender too."
Bolin's face moved through several distinct expressions in rapid succession.
Mako closed his eyes.
I'm an idiot, he thought. It was a clean, clear, unhurried thought with no anger in it, just the flat recognition of a person recalibrating. The water tribe clothes, the earth disks, the fire — she said she came from far away — she's the—
"You're the Avatar," he said. "And I'm an idiot."
Bolin's jaw disconnected from the rest of his face. "No way. You're the Avatar?!"
"Huh." Winter tilted her head, studying Korra with the expression of someone updating a calculation that had already been running for some time. "So you're the Avatar. Not what I expected." A pause. "But in a way — that actually makes sense. You're like Tohra, in your own way."
Korra blinked. "I am?"
"I'll explain more about that later." Winter turned back toward the window. Outside, Republic City burned with its particular electric light, indifferent and brilliant and ongoing.
Later became the next morning, and the morning after that, and the one after that:
The gates went up in flame.
Korra stood in front of the smoldering wreckage of a two-thousand-year-old training apparatus with the expression of someone who has made a decision and is now evaluating the consequences and finding them mixed.
"That," Tenzin said, in a very specific voice, "was a two-thousand-year-old treasure."
"I tried," Korra said, and she had tried — she had tried all morning, with the breath-work and the footwork and the closed eyes — and the gates had hit her anyway, every single time, and the frustration had built and built and built until it had found the nearest available outlet, which was fire.
"You aren't listening," Tenzin said.
"Maybe I'm not getting it because you're a terrible teacher!"
The words hit the air and sat there.
Korra turned and walked, because walking was better than everything else she might do right now.
"Korra—"
Winter was already moving. She caught Tohra's eye, tilted her head. He fell in beside her without a word, and the two of them went after Korra the way they'd been going after things since childhood: together, without needing to discuss it.
Behind them, Meelo kicked a piece of charred gate debris across the courtyard with the focused energy of a small child contributing to the aftermath of something he wasn't entirely sure he understood.
"You're a terrible teacher, Daddy!" he announced, and then ran.
Jinora hugged her father's arm. Ikki hugged the other side.
Tenzin stood in the ruins of a two-thousand-year-old training device and looked down at his daughters and thought, very quietly:
Maybe Korra was right.
The Pro Bending Arena, that night:
The three of them had snuck into the building for the second time in as many days, and Winter was beginning to form the theory that Korra's relationship with the concept of curfew was primarily philosophical.
But this time, something was wrong.
The locker room had the specific quality of a space from which someone was conspicuously absent. Mako stood with his arms folded and his jaw set, radiating the contained frustration of a person doing very precise accounting on a situation and finding the numbers don't add up.
"That idiot," he said, with a restrained fury that suggested the word idiot was standing in for a more comprehensive assessment, "is a no-show. Tonight of all nights." He looked at the empty gear rack. "There goes the match. There goes the tournament slot."
"What about Korra?"
Everyone looked at Winter.
She was studying Mako with the same flat, assessing calm she'd had in the gym the night before — reading the situation the way she read everything, quickly and without sentiment.
"She's a top-tier waterbender," Winter continued. "You have an open spot. And she knows how to compete — she just doesn't know your rules yet." A measured pause. "You'd have to walk her through it. But I think she'd surprise you."
Mako stared at her.
Winter waited.
There was something about her, he was discovering, that made arguing feel less like arguing and more like documenting your own objections for a record no one would ever check. He wanted to push back. He wanted to say: she's a stranger, she doesn't know the system, this is a terrible idea. And all of those things were true.
They were just also apparently not sufficient.
"Fine," he said. "Come on. Get your gear on. And don't make me regret this."
He was already walking.
He regretted it. Then he didn't.
The first round was a masterclass in learning a new set of rules by breaking all of them in sequence. Korra's first move — a water blast directly sideways — produced a buzzer, a referee's declaration of foul, and Mako putting his palm to his face with the expression of a man updating his regret assessment in real-time.
"You're supposed to knock them backward," he said. "Not off the sides."
"What's the difference?!"
"Direction."
She went over the edge eventually. Bolin lasted a little longer, then followed. The first round belonged to the opposition.
Then the second round. The third.
And in the third round, Korra stopped fighting the match the way she'd been fighting the morning's wind gates — head-on, full commitment, maximum force — and something else happened instead.
She moved differently.
Nobody in the crowd could have explained exactly when it changed. One moment she was being pushed back, the same as she'd been all night — and then her feet shifted, just slightly, and her center of gravity dropped, and her eyes closed for one breath, two, three—
Just this gate. Just this moment.
She began to move.
The water answered her the way it had always answered her — completely, immediately, without question — but she asked it for something different now. Not force. Flow. She wove around the incoming fire, let the earth slide under her feet and redirected her weight without breaking rhythm, and then began to push back.
Mako stood at his position and watched the opposition's three remaining benders get dismantled one after another by his temporary teammate, and the expression on his face was not uncomplicated. There was surprise in it. There was the particular kind of respect that comes from having been skeptical and then being wrong. And underneath all of that, very quiet, was something else entirely — the beginning of a thought he was going to need more time to finish.
The third opponent hit the water.
The Fire Ferrets win.
The crowd's roar was the loudest Korra had heard since arriving in the city.
On his way out of the building, Tenzin passed Winter and Tohra in the corridor.
He stopped.
He looked at them with the expression of a man who is choosing his question carefully.
"Did you know about this?"
Winter inclined her head. The precise fractional bow she used for apologies she actually meant.
"Yes. And we're sorry for not telling you, Master Tenzin."
A long pause.
And then Tenzin — airbending master, Councilman, son of the Avatar, man who had spent his morning standing in the ruins of an ancient training device and wondering if he was actually bad at the thing he'd devoted his life to — chuckled.
"There's no need to apologize," he said. "I was wrong. It seems pro bending was exactly what she needed. The perfect teacher, in its own way." He looked out toward the ring. "The teachings finally clicked — just not in the way I expected them to."
"You're saying it turned out to be exactly what she needed?" Tohra asked. The words came carefully, but they came.
Tenzin nodded.
"Exactly that."
In the ring, Bolin was managing to congratulate Korra while also somehow spinning in a small circle of personal victory, which was a feat of coordination that said something complimentary about his training regimen. Mako stood nearby, arms folded, but no longer with the tension of earlier in the evening — a looser fold, the tension replaced by something that looked, if you caught it at the right angle, like quiet satisfaction.
And then the two saiyans came through the door.
Korra looked up, and before Winter could say anything, Tohra had already crossed the distance between them.
She watched him come and tried to read his expression, and found, as she often did, that it was like trying to read a page in a language she almost knew — there were words she recognized, but the grammar was different.
"Great job," he said. Each word placed with deliberate care, like something heavy carried precisely. "I knew... you would win." A pause, in which he seemed to be deciding whether to continue. He continued. "I knew you'd be fine." Another pause. "Proud of you, Korra."
Korra stared at him.
It was, objectively, not a long speech. It was not eloquent or dramatic. It contained no flourishes.
But there was something in hearing Tohra — who was not, by nature, a person who talked when he didn't mean it — say those words with that careful weight that landed somewhere in her chest with a warmth she didn't entirely have a category for. She had known him for three days. She barely knew anything about him. And yet.
"Thanks, Tohra," she said. "I appreciate it, big guy."
He smiled.
It was a small smile. Contained. But entirely real.
From a distance, Bolin watched this exchange with the furrowed brow of someone doing math he hadn't expected to be assigned.
Huh, he thought. I didn't know those two got along like that. When did that happen?
He filed it away for later, and went back to his spinning.
Air Temple Island. Late.
Korra found Tenzin on the upper terrace, looking out over the bay.
"I'm sorry," she said. "For keeping it a secret."
"You don't have to be." He turned to face her with an expression that had traveled a considerable distance since the morning. "I was trying to teach you patience, and I lost mine in the process. The lesson came — it just arrived by a different path than I expected." He smiled. "That's quite all right."
She grinned. Started to walk away.
"Oh — I kind of permanently joined the Fire Ferrets while I was at it," she said, over her shoulder. "Tournament's next month. You should come watch."
Tenzin opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Looked at the sky.
Chuckled, against his better judgment, with the helpless warmth of someone who has accepted that this is simply what Korra is.
What am I going to do with you, he thought.
"Not to worry, Master Tenzin," Winter said, appearing at his side like a person who had been there all along. "My brother and I will keep an eye on her." She nodded toward where Korra was already talking Bolin's ear off about the match. "We'll make sure she doesn't get into too much trouble."
Tenzin watched Winter and Tohra fall in beside Korra, one on each side, and Korra — without looking up, without breaking her sentence — stepped naturally into the space between them, as if that was simply where she had always been.
He stood on his terrace and let the warm night air move through him.
They'll be good for her, he thought. Whoever they are.
They'll be very good for her.
END OF CHAPTER II
Next time: Chapter III — The Revelation.
Hey guys, Novaflame6 here. Just a quick note.
This story will stay close to the cannon for... most of book 1. It will branch off into it's own story at some point cuz you know... I have to account for the power gap between saiyans and regular benders. Cooler will be introduced soon, so don't worry about that. Since Cooler is really the first major villain of this story, amon will more or less be more of a... subplot in the grand scheme of things. Just forewarning. I'll sprinkle in some of the more important events from the cannon story in between villains (Dbz/Kai, DBS, DBAF, DBXV I&II). I may even pull a villain from DB heroes to balance out the power scaling (just so the saiyans aren't the only OP characters in the story lol plus... saiyans need someone who is a legitimate threat to them.).
So below is a poll of potential villains I may or may not introduce. Plz vote to take your pick:
Cumber (Super DB Heroes)
Mira & Towa (DB Xenoverse)
Janemba (Dbz)
Xicor (DBAF)
Rigor(DBAF)
Akuma (DB: Father of Saiyans- Mastar Media fanfilm)
Golden Perfect Cell (DBS- Fan Concept)
Other (Write in or suggestion)
Anyways, that's it for now.
Setup kind of chapter with not much action. Action is coming, just not the best at describing fight scenes myself lol. I'm better at generalizing what goes on in fights. If it's not to your liking, 🤷♂️ I tried.
See ya in the next chapter!