Library
Korra grumbled to herself as she searched the bookshelves. Asami had so much stuff. It was frankly unnerving. There hadn’t exactly been the opportunity to own much back in the compound; she had what the White Lotus gave her and what they allowed her parents to give her. Nothing too ‘distracting’ had been permitted. There had been a horrible few days when a particularly grumpy guard had tried to have Naga added to that last, but thankfully common sense (in the personage of an absolutely furious Katara demanding to know why on earth they had seen fit to separate not just the Avatar from their animal guide but a child from their only friend and threatening to shove an icicle somewhere unpleasant should the situation not be rectified) had prevailed. There had been a library there but the books had been very carefully selected. Asami just seemed to buy anything that took her fancy and the shelves had no organisation that Korra could understand. There was a system, she knew that much; Asami couldn’t function without one, but it was beyond her comprehension.
Korra ran her fingers across the spines and stopped dead. There was a book here with her name on it. She slid it off the shelf.
To call it a notebook would have been unfair. Asami’s notebooks were properly bound hardback books in the company colours, the gear logo embossed on the front cover. Asami never did anything by halves, after all. Korra took it over to the desk and turned on the lamp. The first page, other than the contents page, was a rough outline of a female figure. It looked uncomfortably like one of the autopsy reports Mako had once left on the temple kitchen table, to Pema’s horror. The figure was heavily annotated in red and black, picking out torn shoulder muscles and broken ribs, deep cuts at the wrists and ankles. There was a dotted line across at the level of the figure’s hips, labelled in Asami’s painfully neat handwriting, ‘loss of feeling from here down’. Korra’s stomach flipped. She knew exactly what she was looking at. Her. Her, after the Red Lotus had damn near killed her. The caption only confirmed it; Korra, 36 hours.
Korra sat back in the chair, staring at her own image. She’d known she’d been in bad shape. You didn’t just shrug off the kind of beating Zaheer had put her through, even without being poisoned, but everything had been so...so hazy in the aftermath. Asami had helpfully noted that even at this point Korra was struggling to stay awake, never mind giving anything approaching a coherent answer beyond ‘it hurts, it hurts,’. The ink had run in places here. As if water had been dripped on it. Korra turned the page, driven more by horrified fascination than interest, and was thankful to find a lack of images this time. The fact it was titled ‘Poison’ was less reassuring. There was a list of known facts regarding it; its colour, its effects, the quantity that Suyin had removed. These were then cross-referenced against a truly frightening number of possible culprits, narrowed down to two. Korra was not surprised in the slightest to see that Asami had done her own maths, based on the bowl’s volume, that suggested as much as a hundred millilitres of poison was unaccounted for. A later, smaller note suggested that this could clearly not be the case as neither Su nor Lin had detected any traces. Korra snorted. If only.
Korra was only slightly surprised to find the schematics. This was Asami’s book, after all, although most people don’t take the time to design a new kind of mattress. Korra was momentarily puzzled, until she spotted the neat little note. Air Temple mattresses/pillows insufficiently supportive, causing back spasms. Korra’s back muscles winced at the memory. Asami hadn’t been able to knock anything together in time, not until...Korra stopped. The mattress at the palace had certainly fit the description in front of her.
There was another map of her injuries, this one far more detailed, going into the range of sensation and movement Korra had had. There wasn’t much of either but the hopeful tone of the annotations noting the minimal improvements was almost painful. The less cheery ones, about the nightmares, about how withdrawn she’d become, were even worse. There were more notes here. References to books Korra had never read or even heard of. We need to get her out of that bed. Out of that room. She’s fading away in there.
The next page had designs for a very, very familiar wheelchair. Korra wasn’t exactly the most technical minded but she could see the effort that must have gone into it, the thought that had gone into the specifics. Low weight, specifically to make it easier for her to push herself about, the handles on the rims being made of a very particular alloy Korra had never even heard of before to stop them getting too cold, the thicker, more robust tyres to help with rolling across snow.
There was more. Asami must have read every book in print about poison, about nerve damage, about trauma, and between summations of what must have been a small library’s worth of research and personal correspondence with several different experts there were the designs. A device to carry someone up stairs. Leg braces, on the assumption of a partial recovery, that would have allowed her some measure of mobility and, as Asami had noted, were easily concealable to afford her a little more privacy. And a saddle.
The saddle stopped Korra dead. It followed the same base design as Naga’s saddle, but with the addition of a back brace and waist straps. There were variations, untold hours of work culminating in a set of designs that covered every possible outcome of her recovery, or lack thereof. There were mounting blocks, and mounting ramps, completed with a collapsible wheelchair that could be stowed in an inbuilt saddle pouch. Korra was too engrossed in the images to hear the footsteps behind her.
Asami draped her arm around Korra’s shoulders.
“You find that book on Kyoshi?” She asked, and then saw the book in her hands. “Ah.” She sounded a little guilty. “So you found that, huh?”
“You did all this?” Korra asked, stunned. “For me? Asami, this is...well,” she flicked through the pages. The book was almost full. “This is something else. This must have taken...”
“Three years. Off and on.”
“I had no idea.”
Asami pulled out the spare chair and sat.
“I wanted to help. No, I needed to help. And I couldn’t heal you, I couldn’t stop you hurting, I couldn’t get you to talk, I couldn’t keep the nightmares away. I tried to understand so I started sketching out where you’d been hurt and, well, it snowballed.”
Korra finally looked up from the book.
“I’d say it was of an avalanche than a snowball, but hey.” She bumped her arm against Asami’s. “Have I told you that you’re amazing today? Because I really need to start doing that on a daily basis. Maybe hourly.”
Asami pretended to consider it.
“I could stand to hear it a little more often.”
“You’re amazing. And I love you. And I’m so lucky to have you in my life.”
Asami smiled.
“I love you too, you sappy dork.”