Work Text:
For the first month after Korra leaves, Asami doodles wheelchairs. Motors that can disengage for manual use. A stick control like a plane, to steer. Four spidery legs to climb stairs, that fold up underneath. Snow tires.
She keeps the good ones in her desk. The margins of her letters to Korra are filled with airships, biplanes, whatever bits of wiring or gearwork are vexing her today, but never wheelchairs.
When Korra's been gone about a month, Asami has a meeting with the owner of an ore refinery who hasn't been delivering on his contracts. He's had lunch served to them, but as he gets louder and more defensive, he keeps getting to his feet and leaning over Asami while he makes his points. Asami feels awkward standing up with her fish half-eaten on the plate in front of her, so she just sits there and lets him do it. He's nothing, a nuisance, she'll find other suppliers and he'll be out of business soon enough, but when she gets home she goes through her wheelchair sketches with a newly critical eye.
***
Adapting a mecha tank into a lightweight, unobtrusive, powered exoskeleton is just the sort of project that's fun to think about after a long day of power plants and relay stations. Metal is going to be too heavy; some sort of resin-and-silk laminate, maybe, stiff and strong and lightweight. The backpack battery unit is manageable; it's the servos that are the real problem. Feedback, flexibility, control.
Asami stays up late one night in her private workshop, fiddling around, until it's late enough and she's tired enough that she has to put down her soldering iron. Empty-handed, certain questions present themselves, like, what is she doing, and is this even something Korra would want.
Even if she thinks it every day, Asami can't ever write "you don't have to be completely recovered to come back"; to raise the question is to admit not-complete-recovery to the world of the possible. She will not give Korra anything less than her full confidence and full support. She boxes up the designs and maquettes and prototype knee joints. Korra will probably be back long before she could get it working, anyways.
***
Asami designs a more-efficient engine. Asami designs an underwater wing to lift the hull of a moving boat to reduce drag. Asami redesigns the control surfaces of the midsize airship. Future Industries needs more designers, more builders, more everybody; Asami runs talent searches and talks to the heads of the Republic City schools about holding a city-wide science fair. She tells Korra how young the students all seem, and then crosses it out, rewrites that page.
***
Zeppelins, icebreakers, submarines - there are so many ways Asami could traverse the southern winter. She doesn't.
***
Lin Beifong comes to her with a request: Zaheer has nearly broken out twice, can Asami help them design a more secure prison? Asami privately doesn't see why they don't just kill him, but Aang and Zuko had set a precedent at the end of the old war, so, they don't. Apparently Zaheer doesn't eat, anyways, and Asami gathers that everyone is sort of hoping he'll die from that one of these days, but she thinks if he's managed to live for over a year already there's no particular hope that it will kill him any time soon.
She takes a certain undeniable vindictive pleasure in designing his new cage - limiting someone's access or flow of air is sort of like burying them alive.
***
Sometimes when Asami picks up a component she can't help but think about how it would fit into that exoskeleton.
***
Kuvira believes that trains are the future. Asami still likes airships best.
***
Asami had made sure that through the whole long prison-construction process she never actually saw Zaheer - she has no idea whether a vulnerability to ideologues, like a weakness for drink, might be something that runs in families. Safest to make sure he never has a chance to speak to her. She doesn't want to hear a word he has to say. Unfortunately her involvement has somehow given the Airbenders the impression that she's interested, like knowing what happens to that blot on humanity is supposed to give her some sense of justice or closure. So they keep giving her little updates, like, Jinora says he spends most of his time in the spirit world, or, the guards report he's still living on air and water like one of those spiky little plants, what are they called.
Asami wonders if Korra ever has to see him in the spirit world, if she's spending time in the spirit world. Asami can't picture what it's like at all, a place that's as big as a world but the bits are all interconnected. She vaguely recalls that the geometers at Ba Sing Se University were working on things like that, crazy webbed and knotted things you couldn't really make with pipes or wire. Maybe wherever Korra could run in the spirit world Zaheer can follow her, spilling out words like poison.
Maybe Korra can't run in the spirit world at all. Asami knows there's no bending there. She doesn't know about bodies.
She gets the exoskeleton designs back out - she's sure Korra couldn't take it into the spirit world, but she ought to have one world at least where she can run.
***
During the day she works on trains. At night she plays with hip joints, knees, ankles. Adjusting the hinge of an ankle support it suddenly occurs to her that Zaheer was only a bender at the very end of his imprisonment - that if he was meeting the other members of the Red Lotus there, the entire time, he must have been entering the spirit world as a non-bender.
Asami realizes she is clutching the edge of the table. She makes her hands let go, and then, although it's the middle of the night, goes out to the garage and starts methodically tuning up and cleaning the engine of her favorite car. The parts are real under her hands, the motor, the grease, the wires; she can hold the shape of it in her mind. If Korra needs allies in the spirit realm she's going to have to fall back on Jinora. Asami, for all her love, can't even think about it.
***
She wonders if the spirit world was a comfort for the Red Lotus benders, to escape from their jails where their bending was choked and starved into a place where it didn't exist at all, or if it was as hard for them to let go of their bending as it would be for her to let go of the solidity and logic of physical things.
She hasn't seen Korra in almost two years.
***
Better streetlights. Better boilers.
***
Is she the Zaheer of their generation? Asami likes patterns and she can't help but notice the way these little groups come together. Iroh, Pakku, Bumi, and Piandao; Aang, Katara, Zuko, Toph, and Sokka; P'Li, Ming-Hua, Ghazan, and Zaheer. Korra, Mako, Bolin, and Asami. The benders and the non-bender. Maybe the Red Lotus went bad because Zaheer was never really a non-bender.
How does Korra not see that it's as unnatural to hold herself apart from them as it must have felt to P'Li and Ming-Hua in their isolated, hostile prisons?
***
Sometimes she solves a problem and doesn't even care at all. So what, a better biplane. Tenzin goes south to visit Korra and comes back with a glowing report on her progress - she's running, jumping, bending. The exoskeleton is almost finished and it's completely pointless.
Asami makes herself keep writing letters.
***
If she had been allowed to visit. If she could have ten minutes. One letter. A glimpse, in passing, two cars, waiting at the same corner, the drivers nodding to each other.
If Korra wouldn't see her at all, but would let her walk in the halls where she has learned to walk again, let her see the ground that has held up her feet.
***
Sometimes she thinks about writing to Sifu Katara. She had met her, once, back after Amon. She had been so stupid then, wishing Sokka was still alive. It's easy to be the non-bender. There's one in every generation.
Katara knows how to love an Avatar. Katara knows how to be true to someone who will always put the world first. What could she tell Asami, if Asami could ask?
***
The exoskeleton project is taking up valuable space in her workshop, and there's something vaguely macabre about severed legs lying there like half a body. Mako knows a guy who took a bad fall and broke his back and had to leave the force. Asami fits the braces to his body, and tunes the servos to his motions.
Held up in the mecha legs, he still can't make the stances that would let him bend again. But he can walk up stairs, he can stand and reach things on a high shelf. He's unbearably grateful, like Asami did any of this with him in mind. He asks if she can make them for his friends, the other broken of Republic City who trade tips about ramps and doorways and where they can get to on wheels. Another product of Future Industries, why not.
***
Mako has tea with Asami sometimes, when he can get away from his prince. Sometimes she thinks about kissing him, about doing more. Maybe they could hold each other and admit how much they miss her. But Asami doesn't want him like that; she wants him in a bed she shares with Korra, Korra taking turns between them. She wants all of them happy, she doesn't want to cling to Mako in the cold.
She has no idea if Korra would want that. Asami's never said anything. Korra's never said anything. There have been glances. Korra's hand once met her hand in Naga's fur, and they had both looked over at Mako, and back at each other.
Korra was probably just thinking it was all pretty awkward. Korra probably hadn't even felt a spark. Just because Naga belongs to Korra but is happy to be petted and ridden by Asami doesn't make that a good working model for human relationships.
If Korra wanted to come back to Mako, it would be worth it, if she came back.
***
Sometimes there's nothing to do but viciously, brutally sketch out a new kind of engine.
***
When Asami really can't stop thinking about what it would be like, to watch Korra riding Mako, she goes out and finds a girl for the night, someone happy to be driven in a fast car and poured drinks from the top shelf. Pushing aside little wispy bits of silk, she can almost pretend she's not thinking about helping Korra with her weird water-tribe undergarments.
***
Sometimes pistons and pipes are just too much. She works on a projectile electroshock weapon. It's a little chilling, to imagine it in use, but the unrest in the Earth Kingdom just keeps going.
***
If it takes five years. If it takes ten years? If Korra will only come back when she is unconquerable, and if she will, always, have been conquered.
There have been famous blind gurus. There have been great armless poets. Jinora says there was a master airbender, once, who had a disease of the lungs that closed his chest and didn't let him breathe if he exerted himself. If there could be an airbender who couldn't breathe, who wheezed in the cold, why not an Avatar who can't do whatever it is Tenzin won't admit she can't do?
***
Asami designs an explosive with the longest fuse she can. Asami designs a better battery but every battery drains eventually.
***
She will not make up a deadline. She will not.
***
Asami makes a tiny exoskeleton for a baby born too floppy and weak to grow up right. She does the work herself. Why not? It doesn't take up much space on her workshop table.
***
If Korra never comes back. If there was a new Avatar. Would Asami meet them someday?
***
Is that what Korra wants?
***
She almost writes in a letter, please, promise me, let me see you one last time before you give up. I'm working on a new kind of airplane. I could be there in hours.
She crosses out everything but the new kind of airplane, then crumples up the paper. Dear Korra, she writes, another calm, matter-of-fact letter about her week, like the hundred-plus before.
***
Korra writes her a letter.
***
Asami cries.
***
She doodles airships and keeps the good ones in her desk. Call it a hunch: she thinks Korra is going to want to be traveling soon. Airships for two, for three, for four; whatever Korra wants; if she is finally done with her isolation then Asami will be ready to go with her.