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After he wakes from the sedatives, the Councilman is just… weird, going from wheedling amiability to self-important bossy asshole to Nice Uncle as if he’s trying different things to see what works.
Despite this, Korra can still sense how incredibly pissed he is at her, but that figures, given that she’s kidnapped him and all.
And why has she kidnapped him? Well, a show of force, if nothing else. Zaheer isn’t interested in ransom money.
Inevitably, the Councilman asks questions: what’s her name? What does she want? Can he help her in any way?
Korra doesn’t answer.
She watches him make note of his surroundings. There isn’t much to inform him of his location. They’re in the cellar of a safe house a few miles away from Republic City, and it’s windowless and soundproof. He has to know that his odds of survival aren’t looking too hot right now.
Eventually, the uncertainty gets to him, and his facade breaks completely. He tells her she’s a cowardly little shit and that, whatever she’s doing, it’s probably just a sad plea for attention because notoriety is a cheap substitute for fame. He spends some time speculating about her mediocrity. He spends a good ten minutes delivering a monologue about how she’s likely dumber than a sack of wet gerbilchickens, which are dumber than chickens and gerbils combined.
By the time he shuts up, Korra wants to punch him in the liver a bit.
She waits.
As she hasn’t done anything to confirm that she isn’t stupid, the Councilman then tries to push his luck by asking her to remove the ropes from his wrists so he can answer the call of nature. He really does think she’s that dumb.
Korra removes the ropes, because she knows how things’ll turn out for him.
With the predictability of a cornered animal, he tries to kill her.
--
He’s more competent than Korra expected. Maybe Korra wouldn’t have removed the ropes if she’d guessed. Initially, she thinks she can beat him using waterbending alone, but then he does this thing that feels like her body is gripped by one giant muscle spasm. It hurts so bad that she’s unable to move, barely even able to scream, and then the Avatar state kicks in and then the fight is over.
When the Avatar state goes away, Korra realizes that maybe beating the shit out of some guy in a basement doesn’t feel so great, even if he did tell her she’s a moron.
She wonders what she would’ve done if she hadn’t been able to use the Avatar state. Maybe all that time spent meditating and reading Zaheer’s musty old scrolls on chakras have paid off. (Although she must wonder: what is the point of all her spiritual development if all it means is that she’s capable of beating the shit out of some guy in a basement? Heck, one time while meditating she actually came into contact with Aang, but he just looked at her and said, “Oof,” before vanishing and she hasn’t spoken to him since.)
She studies the Councilman as he lies on the ground, one of his legs trapped by the broken cellar floor. His clothes are only a little bit on fire, so she quickly puts them out, feeling sheepish. She was meant to be passing herself off as a regular waterbender, but that was a bust.
She then checks his injuries. She’s meant to be keeping him alive. If he dies, Zaheer is going to give her such an ‘I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed’ kind of look. Nothing’s broken, he’s just a little more burned in places. Lightly seared, you could say.
After she’s somewhat convinced he’s not going to die any time soon (unless it’s from old age), she ties his wrists together again.
As an afterthought, she also pushes his hair away from his face. She knows that their fight was completely avoidable, and was a consequence of her ego more than anything, but… Well, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
When he’s capable of speech again, he says, “I’ll hurt you, you horrible little bitch.”
Korra speaks to him now. “Oh no,” she says, holding her hands up. “What are you going to do about it? Give me severe cramp again? Quick, I’d better do some gentle stretches before you charley horse me to death.”
His eyes widen, and then he just sits there perfectly still for a moment while his little politician brain works away. She doesn’t know what conclusion it comes to, but whatever it is, he looks horrified.
“What do you want from me?” he asks, quieter than before.
Korra’s been told (repeatedly, to the point where she wanted everyone to shut up about it) to not answer questions. She shrugs.
He sighs, then takes a good look at her. “The fact that I can see your face means I’m probably not getting out of this alive, right?”
Oh. No, that’s… Actually, she hadn’t thought about it that way. She’d worn a mask while she was in the city, then taken it off because it was uncomfortable. Now he can identify her, she feels dumb. Maybe she is dumb. It’s something she’s considered before, while meditating: you know, perhaps I’m dumb. If she was smart, maybe it wouldn’t have hit a nerve when he accused her of being stupid.
But again, she just shrugs.
He doesn’t say anything else, but looks miserable and resigned. He smells like sweat and fear. The journey from the city was pretty rough, and he doesn’t look any prettier after losing a fight.
He’s still staring at her, though. There’s something else in his look of resignation. Men have been known to stare at Korra, although they usually knock it off when she stares back. (Maybe that’s why she never gets asked on dates.)
“Worse ways to die, I guess,” he mutters.
Wait. Korra takes a moment to interpret the implications of that comment, then realizes… Oh. Has he decided to stop being scared of her? What an asshole.
Korra moves closer to him, then crouches so they’re eye to eye. She grabs his chin and tilts his head back. He flinches, caught off-guard by this.
She thinks about how it’d be if their situations were reversed. If she was kidnapped by some guy like him, she definitely wouldn’t be saying stuff like ‘worse ways to die’ or whatever.
She stares him down. If he was really committed to putting up a fight, he could try biting her thumb off while she has her hand on his jaw, but he just stares back at her, transfixed. Apparently they’re both aware that she could hurt him very easily.
She’s aware of his breathing, and of the faint stubble on his jaw. It’s then then that she realizes that she doesn’t get this close to men very often. Not like this, anyway.
“You stink,” she announces, then gives him a hard shove away from her.
She goes back upstairs and leaves him alone for a while, so she can meditate for a bit. Maybe that’ll help.
--
Something (something strange and squirmy deep in her gut, which might be guilt, or… something else) compels her to take a tub of water, some washcloths, and a bar of soap down into the cellar.
The Councilman gives her a very odd look when he sees it.
“You smell like ass and you need to keep your injuries clean,” Korra says, before she can lose her nerve. Then she realizes that it sounds like she’s trying to justify her actions. She doesn’t need to justify anything. She’s the Avatar.
“...Okay?” he says.
There’s an uncomfortable silence, and then Korra gets her act together.
She sets the water down on the floor, then uses some of the water to form an ice knife. She then approaches him. He fixes his gaze on the knife, and says, “Wait. Wait, wait…” right as she takes the back of his jacket and starts to cut it away.
Korra pauses for a moment.
“Do you know how much my clothes cost?” he says.
“They’re got burn marks on them and they smell like man sweat.”
“I know, but you can’t just-...”
“What? Are you worried about your dignity? You’re a politician. You don’t have any.”
The Councilman tries to muster some bravado and says the most absurd and very definitely untrue thing Korra has ever heard: “You just want to see me naked.”
The Councilman shouldn’t be joking about that. The guy could stand to show a bit more mortal terror.
Korra places the flat blade of the ice knife on the nape of his neck, making him flinch. “If the fabric sticks to your burns, they’ll get infected,” she says.
He should probably protest more, but doesn’t.
Whenever she finds that his burns have stuck to the fabric, she uses the water to soak it off. He holds his breath whenever she does this, but doesn’t make any noise. Funny. She was expecting him to be more of a wuss.
Like most waterbenders, he has a good back and shoulders. He’s lean, but not as sinewy as the guys Korra grew up with. He’s a little soft in the midsection. Fewer scars than the guys Korra knows, too.
If she did want to see him naked, then what would that have to do with anything? Who doesn’t look at a man, ‘hey, I wonder what he looks like naked?’ In fact, who doesn’t look at a woman from time to time and think the same? Everyone does it.
She finds herself cutting away the fabric of his pants.
“Erm,” he says, as if he’s about to ask, ‘Excuse me. Miss? Is this legal?’ He actually sounds embarrassed rather than outraged.
“You have a cut on your inner thigh,” Korra growls, feeling very defensive even though there is a cut there, she can see the blood stain and everything. Then she looks at his face. She’s willing to stop, although the bad thing is that she doesn’t know what she’d take as a sign to stop. She then has a very uncomfortable moment where she tries to figure out… what sort of person she is. Is she someone who removes people’s clothing at knifepoint? Because it currently looks that way.
But he does need a wash and she doesn’t dare free his hands again.
His face is… well, hard to read.
It’s then that Korra notices the bulge in his pants. Korra has heard enough from Ming-Hua to know what the bulge implies.
“Whoa there,” she says.
“Er,” he says.
“Really?” she says.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Really?” she repeats.
“Well.”
“I just beat the crap out of you. That’s… why would… how…” Korra is speechless. Men are a frickin’ enigma.
“It’s an automatic reaction to…” he begins, then gives up and just admits, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m like this, but I’ve been working very long hours lately which doesn’t allow much time for anything else, and under other circumstances, it’d be a healthy response to, uh, certain stimuli, and I don’t know if the fact that I’m probably in mortal peril makes it better or worse. Worse, obviously. It’s inappropriate. But-”
An evil urge possesses Korra and she neatly cuts down the fly of his pants, allowing her to see one whole entire penis(!), which is a lot more penis than she usually sees, and then she puts the flat bit of the ice knife right on the tip. He yells so loudly that she goes deaf in one ear.
The Councilman then releases a string of words that Korra would typically expect to hear from a sailor who’s suffered an intimate injury from a lobster.
The Councilman has been kidnapped, beaten up, left in a situation where he’s resigned to death… And somehow, you’d think that getting his dong touched by a cold object was the worst thing to happen to him.
Despite the contact with ice, his penis only looks mildly discouraged rather than completely deflated. Maybe it’s as confused as the man attached to it.
Korra takes an academic interest in it.
She considers asking him if all dicks have veins like that or if he’s just special. The last time she saw a dick, it was only for a split second and it was immediately followed by a tirade about how she never knocks before opening doors, and then she felt weird whenever she was around Ghazan for weeks afterwards.
She’s always expected penises to look like… gaebul, which look gross but are great when eaten raw with salt. This one looks more like an aggressive geoduck. Is she meant to be repulsed or scandalized by it? Or is she meant to find it sexy? She doesn’t know. She just knows that it looks very… sensitive. She also knows that she liked the noise that the Councilman made when she touched it with the ice knife. She can cope with being deaf in one ear.
When she remembers to actually look at his face, he looks completely stricken. Korra then remembers that he has his erect dick right out in the open, and she’s holding an ice knife. She thinks of how you prepare gaebul by slicing it into little pieces and dipping it in sauce.
She quickly melts the ice knife.
“I’m… just gonna ignore that,” Korra tells his penis, then goes about washing the rest of him.
She makes it a quick job. She’s very distracted. Maybe she should feel more awkward and embarrassed. She wonders what an appropriate amount of embarrassment would be. She has an abstract notion that girls are meant to be embarrassed by the sight of… a big fat dick poking right out, but if anything, she’s just surprised. No one anticipates kidnapping a guy and then getting an anatomy lesson out of it.
Even after she’s finished washing him, he’s still hard. The slit of his dick has a small bead of moisture on it.
“You’re leaking,” she observes.
“It’s normal,” he insists, in a voice slightly higher than usual.
Absolutely fascinating. She’s not gonna touch it, though. He’s a politician, she doesn’t know where he’s been.
“I’m not washing that thing,” she says, still staring at his cock because she knows that staring is just making the situation worse. “You do it. I’ll unfasten your hands. If you try to attack me again, it won’t end well. It’s a nice dick. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” Wait. WHY DID SHE SAY THAT LAST PART?
He’s unable to meet her eyes, but he nods.
After she frees his hands again, he tentatively dabs at himself with the washcloth. He doesn’t bother to ask why he has to wash his dick while she watches, although if he did, she’d probably answer with something unsexy about his junk being a sweat trap.
It doesn’t take long before Korra finds herself saying, “Actually, you know what… You might as well get it out your system.” Maybe he has a lot to get out.
That makes him speak. “What?”
“You know what I mean.”
“With you watching?” he says, in a small voice.
“That might… fix it faster.”
Korra didn’t realize it until now, but she has a little mental list of things to do before she dies, and one of the items on that list is ‘see a man blow his load’. She wants to know what sort of range men have. Ming-Hua once told her they could reach up to two feet. Korra wants this to be true, but Ming-Hua also once told her if P’Li holds her breath while taking a shot, the fireball shoots out her ass instead of her forehead, so Ming-Hua is not a reliable source of intel. Still, she sort of hopes that waterbenders have more... aptitude than others.
“Oh,” the Councilman says, and sounds like he might blow his load right there, but instead just leaks out more clear liquid, which manages to be both disgusting and very promising.
His grips his cock with an unsteady hand, and pumps, making the foreskin slide back and forth over the head. He’s surprisingly rough with himself. The sound is ridiculous, a steady slap-slap-slap of skin on skin. The expression on his face almost makes it look like it hurts. He keeps his eyes closed, as if in intense concentration. Korra wonders how many people get to see him like this (probably quite a few, if he’s this much of a perv).
Korra sort of wants to grab his dick and pump it for him, just so she can feel the warmth and vulnerability of it in her hand, but that feels like it’d be crossing a line. She’d like to think she’s detached from everything. He’s the one jerking himself off, she’s just… hanging back and minding her own business. (It just so happens that her business involves staring at a guy’s cock.)
He doesn’t last long. His pace quickens, and then he gives himself a few hard tugs that leave Korra feeling 1) slightly concerned for him, and 2) surprised by how stretchy a penis can be, and then his cock spurts, spilling semen over his knuckles. He pumps out enough jizz to make Korra think ‘yikes’, and then his body goes slack.
Korra feels like she should clap politely. He gets a 4 for range, but a 8 for quantity. (Korra doesn’t know what a 10 would look like, but you’d probably need a mop afterwards.)
She wonders what else he’s willing to do.
Still, she asks, “Will you stop being weird now?”
He doesn’t answer that. “If you’d killed me just then, at least I could have died doing what I loved,” he murmurs, sounding tired. “Actually, if you want to kill me right now, that’d be just great.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” Korra says without thinking.
Without an ounce of hope or sincerity, he asks, “Is that because I’ve impressed you?”
“No.”
He grunts. “Can I have some new clothes?”
Korra almost says, ‘No, I’m not done staring at your balls yet. I need to do this for at least another two days to get my head around how wrinkly balls are.’
Korra shakes her head, and says, “Hold out your wrists.”
He does so, and she ties his hands together again. The guy has surprisingly few issues about being tied up while mostly naked. He still has jizz on his right hand.
Korra is wondering whether she should comment on the jizz when he catches her off guard by asking, “You’re the Avatar, aren’t you?”.
“How do you know I’m the Avatar?”
He looks at her like she’s a moron. “Glowing eyes. Multiple elements. You know.”
Oh. Well. Yeah. That fight was...a bad idea.
The Councilman seems a little hung up on it. “I just jerked off in front of the Avatar. That’s the… opposite of what… Nevermind.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“At least it wasn’t old man Aang,” the Councilman mutters.
“What?” Korra repeats.
“Nice incarnation you got this time,” the Councilman says tiredly. “Was the appearance deliberate? Has anyone compared you to a young version of Katara yet? Going by the statues of her, I think you might be prettier than she was, but Aang always had a rose-tinted view of his wife.”
Korra isn’t sure what he’s talking about, so she just says, “Shut up.”
“Wait,” the Councilman says. “If you’re the Avatar, that makes you… seventeen years old?”
Korra bristles a little.
“That adds an extra level of dysfunction to this situation,” the Councilman mutters. He wipes his right hand on what’s left of his pants. “Do you know how much time and money has been put into searching for you? And… Here you are. In front of me. Still staring at my testicles.”
Korra blurts out, “They’re big,” as if her staring is his fault.
“Don’t make this worse by commenting on my meat-to-dumpling ratio,” the Councilman snaps. “I don’t need a human-shaped bomb making observations about my genitals.”
“I’m not a human-shaped bomb,” Korra snaps back.
“Child soldier, then.”
“I’m seventeen!”
“Precisely. You should be going out to parties and having regrettable sex with your own age group and crying all the time like a normal seventeen year old. Or not, in your case, because you’re a young lady and technically royalty so you should only do the ‘crying all the time’ part! Now, can I have some new pants please, miss?”
Yeah, no. There aren’t any spare pants for him at the moment. Korra didn’t plan on him needing a second pair of pants. “In a while,” Korra says, because she does intend to get him some. It’s not going to look good if anyone finds her keeping a near-naked Councilman in a basement. Then again, that’s only slightly worse than keeping a non-naked Councilman in a basement. And it’s not like the basement is particularly cold or anything. Maybe she doesn’t need to rush with getting him new clothes.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he asks pointedly.
“Excuse me, I’m not the one who left that damp patch on the floor.”
“Are you going to rub my nose in it?”
Absolutely not. Disgusting. Gross. Terrible. No. “Maybe if you do it again,” Korra replies, without thinking.
Right, that’s it. She has to leave the room, and go… get her shit together. ‘Getting her shit together’, in this instance, might involve good use of her right index finger. She stops back upstairs, but does make a mental note to keep an eye on the time so she’ll remember to bring him some drinking water later on. He probably needs the fluid.
“Wait. I still don’t know why you’re keeping me here,” he shouts after her.
But Korra doesn’t answer him. She could tell him that she’s keeping him here to prove a point, but she’s currently she’s not sure what that point might be, other than something like, ‘actually, waterbenders don’t have a range of up to two feet’.
She decides that she’ll keep him around for a while, long enough for Republic City to miss him, and during that time, she definitely won’t make him do any more weird shit. In fact, in no way at all will she spend the next few nights wondering what else he’s willing to do while his hands are tied.
Yeah, this is the first and last time she’s kidnapping anybody.