Chapter Text
Asami glanced down at her phone one more time.
The email had been clear: meet President Raiko in his office at twelve. It was nearly half past, and there was still no sign of the university president. His secretary seemed unperturbed by his tardiness and simply waved Asami away when she came over to question his whereabouts.
It wasn’t uncommon for Raiko to reach out and schedule meetings with students he thought to be the most promising, but he rarely reached out to Asami. At least, not since her father had been caught trafficking and manufacturing illicit arms to a radical group of revolutionaries.
Asami rubbed her forehead with the memory of her fellow classmates running up to her, asking if it was true and if she knew anything. She wasn’t sure if it was better or worse for her that she had zero idea what they were talking about. It wasn’t until her boyfriend at the time stepped in that everyone gave her space and let her contact her father’s lawyers. Thankfully, the trial had been handled relatively quickly, with a unanimous decision to give her father life in prison without parole. It also declared Asami the CEO of the company once she graduated from the university.
It was nearly a quarter to one before Raiko showed up.
“Ah, Asami, you’re already here. Perfect. I hope you weren’t waiting long.”
Only forty-five minutes, but who’s counting.
“No, just enough time for me to finally read the audit reports Rakhem sent me last week. It’s been on my agenda for some time now, I was just never able to find enough time to fully go over them.” Asami smiled at Raiko and held his gaze. She would not be intimidated by him. “You probably know what that’s like, needing every minute to count, being the university president and all.”
Raiko’s secretary stared at Asami, her mouth wide open. Raiko, however, threw back his head and laughed. He shook a finger at Asami, his eyes twinkling, though Asami was sure it wasn’t out of happiness.
“Lavana, the papers, please.”
His secretary dutifully handed him a thick manila envelope. Asami’s eyes narrowed at it, trying to make sense of the words neatly written on the front. Raiko turned and started walking to his office, not even checking to see if Asami was following. A part of her wanted to just turn and leave, he had just wasted forty-five minutes of her time, and she didn’t want to grant him any more. Yet, Asami dutifully followed him into his office and sat in one of his plush chairs.
He circled his desk and opened the manila folder. Asami clenched her jaw as she recognized the newspaper clippings he was rifling through. Shortly after her father’s arrest, when the press got radio silence from Asami, they moved to questioning Republic City University’s integrity in allowing her to stay enrolled in their engineering college. According to the press, as she was the daughter of a corrupt, war-mongering criminal, allowing Asami to continue her studies in courses that could aid in future weapon design was a liability the university couldn’t afford.
“I’m sure you’re wondering why I asked you to meet me here.” Raiko looked up from the papers, and Asami met his challenging gaze. “As you so eloquently stated out there, every minute matters, so I’ll cut to the chase. You know firsthand that the university has a certain reputation to maintain, and that we do our best to protect our students.”
Asami resisted the urge to roll her eyes. The university’s form of protection during her father’s trial had been to prohibit anyone not affiliated with the institution from entering campus. Due to RCU’s maglev station being one of the four major hubs in the city, the security measure failed within a few hours. Campus Security wasn’t equipped to handle the massive flood of commuting students and resorted to turning everyone away without checking IDs. The damage from the students rioting took nearly a year to fix.
“—top student here, and she is our star athlete. I thought if anyone could get her into shape, it’d be you.”
“I’m sorry, you want me to what?”
“I know, it’s a lot to add on your plate.” Raiko gave Asami a sympathetic look, and she was thankful he took her question as disbelief rather than her not paying attention. “But if she’s ineligible to play, then we’ll lose lots of sponsorships, and to be quite frank, the university cannot afford that. And, as I said, you are the brightest student here. If anyone can tutor Korra and get her GPA back up, it’s you.”
Asami stared blankly at Raiko. There was only one Korra that she knew of at the university: the star of the women’s basketball team and a notoriously terrible student. There were numerous rumors that Tenzin took a sabbatical just to get away from her for a year.
“Doesn’t the university have tutors hired precisely for this situation?” Raiko’s eye twitched and Asami knew she said the wrong thing. She quickly added, “I’m not familiar with the guidelines and rules for athletes, but I heard the academic side of their lives tend to be more strict than others.”
Raiko shook his head. “No, no, we smoothed it over with board and got special permission from Toza for your tutoring sessions to replace Korra’s mandatory study sessions.”
“But sir—”
“Now, now, Miss Sato.” Raiko’s eyes bore into Asami’s. “I am aware of the busy schedule you have. I imagine it cannot be easy taking twenty credits while being slowly indoctrinated into becoming the CEO of Future Industries, but—” Asami’s throat tightened as Raiko slowly pushed forward some documents. “—we wouldn’t want this to get released to your board of directors, would we?”
Asami picked up the papers and felt the urge to puke. It was an academic transcript—her academic transcript—as well as a formal letter that stated the university was stripping her degree due to evidence of the misuse of university resources and illicit research into weapon design.
A fabricated smear campaign, genius.
Asami hated how clever it was. Without her graduating, her succession as the CEO would be over before it could even begin, and her family’s reputation would be ruined forever. Raiko had her trapped, and they both knew it.
***
“So why were you at Butakha Arena earlier today?”
Opal slid into the seat across from Asami and began to unpack her bag. She tossed Asami a granola bar, which Asami quickly devoured. Between the meeting with Raiko, reviewing Korra’s entire courseload, and mapping out a plan, food had been the last thing on her mind. She rubbed her forehead and looked at her roommate.
“You’ll never guess what Raiko is making me do,” Asami said. “Korra’s GPA is below the minimum for eligibility, so Raiko has taken it upon himself to have me tutor her until it’s above a two five.” Asami gestured to the array of color-coded notes in front of her. She wasn’t sure what classes she had anticipated Korra to be taking, but kinesiology was not one of them.
“That feels like cruel and unusual punishment,” Opal said. “So you went to Butakha for…?”
“The women’s team had practice today.” Asami shrugged. “I just wanted to see what I’d be working with.”
Asami’s visit offered her little to no new insight on Korra. If anything, it just proved all preconceptions she held—Korra was cocky, arrogant, and a little self-absorbed. For someone on academic probation, Korra looked far too comfortable spreading out on the bench and barking advice at the players on the court. Occasionally, a ball would roll towards her and she'd lazily shoot a basket. She never missed.
“I’m not surprised he enlisted your help,” Opal said. “You are the smartest person I know.”
“I’ll make sure not to tell Baatar that when I see him later.”
Opal shrugged and casually flipped through her textbook. “He knows. If it weren’t for you, I’m sure he would’ve failed out of Earth Kingdom Cultures.”
Asami laughed and stretched back in her seat. Opal’s oldest brother was, in his own right, an engineering genius. He could build almost any machine from scratch based on a description alone, and four out of five times he’d nail every last detail. But when it came to the gen eds, he was completely hopeless. Asami had spent many late nights in the library with Baatar, helping him memorize the lineage of the Earth Kingdom’s Royal Family and the distinct levels of its capital city, Ba Sing Se.
“Well, he really saved me in the weapons engineering course we had to take.”
There could not have been worse timing for Asami to have taken the course: her father had just been arrested and it felt like the entire world was watching her, wanting to see if she, too, shared her father’s radical views. The papers had a field day when it got ahold of her academic schedule and revealed that she had already taken Armament Engineering I and was currently enrolled in Armament Engineering II. It wasn’t until Baatar came forward and stated that Asami expressed next to no interest in the field—and that the class was simply a requirement for aeronautical engineering, something that was later confirmed by the Dean of the Engineering College—that the media circus finally died down.
The heavy memory of dodging the press in between classes lingered, making the quietness of the library feel suffocating. Opal seemed to sense the shift in Asami’s energy because she gently reached out and grabbed her hand. She had a hard, blazing look when Asami finally met her eyes.
“He didn’t do that just because you helped him pass some classes, Asami. He did that because the entire world was trying to paint you as a villain, and the university just stood by and let it happen. We all know you, we know what you stand for. It wasn’t right for Raiko to have let the press hound you for as long as they did.” Opal’s grip on Asami’s hand tightened.
“Thanks, Opal.” Asami forced a smile and glanced at the clock. “I have to get to lab, but I’ll see you at the apartment later.”
Opal pursed her lips but didn’t argue. Asami’s lab period technically didn’t start for another hour, but she needed to get out of the stifling library and somewhere she could lose herself. Ten minutes later, she was descending down into the senior engineering labs. The sharp smell of machine oil and the steady, industrial hum of the hydraulic presses instantly calmed her racing mind. As she settled at her work station, Asami felt the weight of the outside world disappear. Here, Asami was in total control. Here, she was able to just be.
***
Asami jolted up at the sound of incessant pinging.
She had fallen asleep at her desk while looking over the financial statements and core operational reports the interim CEO of Future Industries had sent her. From what she could tell, the company was doing just as expected: scraping by. It wasn’t enough to turn any profit, but not so little to ruin the business.
Her phone screen kept flashing from its place on her bedside table, and Asami groaned as she got up, her lower back feeling incredibly tight and a pain in her neck. A glance at the clock told her it was half past eleven, which meant she had been sleeping at her desk for a good two hours.
Slowly making her way across the room, she swiped open the lock screen to a string of notifications from an unknown number:
Unknown: Hey Asami
Unknown: This is Korra
Unknown: I got your number from Mako
Unknown: Hope that was alright
Unknown: Raiko told me you’re my tutor and stuff so I figured you should have my number
Unknown: Thanks for doing it
Unknown: I’m sure you have a lot of other things you’d rather be doing
Unknown: I told him I had it under control, but he insisted
Unknown: So just let me know when you want to start?
Unknown: Could meet for coffee tomorrow or something
Unknown: Just to chat, not to do actual work
Unknown: I’d rather not do any school work when I don’t have to
Before Asami could even think of a reply, the screen shifted to the incoming call screen. Asami threw her head back and groaned at the ceiling before she brought the phone to her ear.
“Hello?” Asami croaked into the phone.
“Hey! Sorry, did I wake you?” Korra’s voice burst through the speaker. Asami held the phone away from her ear and squinted at the bright screen. Korra sounded entirely too energetic for it being nearly midnight. “I saw you read the texts but didn't reply, so I figured it was easier to just call.”
“You gave me like, four seconds to reply,” Asami said. “And I mean, yes, you did wake me but—” Asami glanced at her desk “—I needed it. I fell asleep at my desk, any longer and I’d probably have a permanent slouch.”
“Postural kyphosis, right. It’s an easy enough fix, but you definitely don’t want that when you’re about to be the face of a company.”
Asami stiffened at the mention of her impending takeover of Future Industries. Two years ago, when the verdict came down, graduation felt a lifetime away. She was supposed to have time—time to breathe, to figure out who she was, to just be normal. But now, as her senior year was starting, the rapidly approaching end was no longer an achievement: it was a deadline closing in on her.
“Anyways, how does coffee sound tomorrow? My treat.”
“Sure, coffee sounds great,” Asami said, her voice finally losing some of its gravelly edge. “There’s a small place just off campus, The Jasmine Dragon. Ever heard of it?”
The Jasmine Dragon was Asami’s go to spot. It had the best lattes within a five-mile radius of campus, almost always had seating, and Asami knew the owner personally. He was a kind old man who loved to sit and chat with his customers. When Asami’s father was on trial, he was one of the only people to treat Asami normally.
“That’s the little shop right off Gaoling Street, right? Love that place, it has the best egg custards.” The grin was evident in Korra’s tone. “Once, I ate an entire tray of them. I got so sick after, but it was totally worth it.”
Asami leaned against her bedside table, a faint smile pulling at the corner of her lips. Korra’s nonchalant and upbeat response was a welcome change from the stiff, measured emails Asami had been receiving.
“Well, maybe tomorrow you can go for two trays.” Korra laughed and Asami pressed her lips together. “How does noon sound?”
“Perfect. Noon works,” Korra said. “And, uh, sorry for calling so late.”
“It’s fine, Korra,” Asami said softly, moving to turn off her desk lamp. “I'll see you tomorrow.”
“Bye, Asami. Don't slouch!”
The line clicked dead. Asami stared at her phone for a moment, shook her head with a quiet laugh, and slowly started getting ready for bed.