Hey guys, RoseSaiyan2 here again! Hopefully you guys enjoyed the last chapter! Now the outcome of this section of season 1 in the legend of korra series I'll be making some rather subtle changes to account for certain characters in this story, namely the oc's.
Since Odyn is a very different kind of male lead, his relationship with Korra will look unique. Remember that he doesn't trust humans that much due to his past with them. Roy and Ikki's relationship will be a little more natural i think (ikki is older in this story to put her closer to Roy's age). As for Bolin... I'll probably still include his infatuation with Korra initially, but I'll change the whole outcome of it because... well Sarai does exist in this story so i'll be using a little of that dynamic to create a better ending to that situation.
Asami may end up with a pairing later on, but we'll see. Which means.. yeah, Mako will end up with another girl. Though I'm pretty sure you guys already know who it'll be. Anyways that's all for now, onto the story!
Chapter Three
The Spirit of Competition — Part I
♪ Opening Theme — Senjou no Valkyria
The screen is dark.
Then, without ceremony, the first still arrives — and it is quiet.
Korra, sitting cross-legged on the roof of Air Temple Island in the early morning, her eyes open and her expression thoughtful, watching the city across the water do the slow, steady work of waking up. She has a cup of tea she has forgotten about. She is thinking about something she has not yet figured out how to say.
A beat.
Odyn, at the edge of the same island, standing with his back to the house, looking out at the same water from the opposite direction. His coat moves in the same wind. He is also thinking about something he has not yet figured out how to say.
The melody begins.
And then the stills become motion — the everyday life of people mid-story:
Mako at the factory, mask off for just a moment, eyes distant. Bolin chasing Pabu through the attic apartment in a way that is chaotic and clearly not the first time. Sarai examining something in a Republic City market stall with an expression of pure, unaffected delight. Roy pointing something out to Jinora and Ikki in the historical district, the afternoon light catching his hair. Khanna standing at a high window in the small hours, watching the city below with that particular look she wore when she was thinking three moves ahead of everyone else.
The tempo builds.
Korra and Odyn, side by side in the gym — she adjusts her stance at his direction, and when she gets it right he steps back and she can see from his face that she got it right, and she grins, and there is something between that grin and his response to it that the camera notices even if neither of them are quite noticing it yet.
The chorus opens up.
Action, now — full and fast:
The Fire Ferrets in the ring, moving in a single coordinated surge, Mako's fire and Bolin's earth and Korra's water working in concert like a language all three of them now speak fluently. The crowd erupts. Equalists scatter through smoke-filled corridors as the group moves through them together. Odyn and Korra facing Amon across a floor of still water, back to back, her fire and his blazing aura meeting in the space between them and holding.
The music peaks.
And then — the final frame:
Odyn turns. He looks at Korra. He reaches out a hand.
She turns to face him.
Her expression is uncertain for exactly one frame — and then she takes his hand.
The title card:
Flame Eyed Bender Chapter Three — The Spirit of Competition, Part I
◈
Three mornings had passed since the incident on Avatar Aang Memorial Island, and Korra had never been so grateful for the familiar smell of a gym.
Not that she would have admitted that to anyone. But there was something real and grounding about the pro-bending arena's training room at this hour — the chalk dust and old wood and the faint ozone smell of bending discharged in close quarters — that had been missing from her life for a few weeks, and she had not realized how much she'd missed it until she walked back through the door and felt her shoulders drop.
"Like that?" she asked.
Odyn stood before her in a loose stance, observing. He had developed, she had noticed, a very specific expression for when he was evaluating her form — not unkind, not cold, just a particular quality of focused attention that made her feel like he was reading something. He walked toward her, and with the practical directness of someone for whom this was entirely professional, he adjusted the angle of her knee with one hand and set his palm against her lower back to correct the line of her spine.
She did not think about how close he was. She was a professional.
"Knees too tense. Relax your footing, straighten your stance." He stepped back and looked at the correction. Something in his face settled. "Now hit me. And don't hold back this time — I mean it."
Korra looked at his open palm, extended toward her like an invitation or a challenge.
She breathed in.
She drove everything she had into the strike.
"HAAAHHHH—"
The impact landed dead-center in his palm. Steam rose from the point of contact. She felt him move back — not much, a fraction, but enough that she knew the force had reached him — and when she looked up at his face she found something there that she had been wanting to earn since the first day she'd met him.
Genuine approval.
"Excellent," he said, and the word was not decoration. "Approach an opponent with that kind of commitment — proper form, full intent — and it won't matter whether they're a bender, a chi-blocker, or anything else. They'll have a serious problem."
She was smiling before she could stop herself. "Well. I do have an excellent teacher."
Odyn met her eyes briefly, and she saw the corners of his mouth move in what was, for him, essentially a full grin, before he turned away.
Across the gym, Mako had stopped moving through his own practice form and was watching the exchange with an expression that was trying to be neutral and mostly succeeding.
When did those two start getting along like that? he thought. He was nearly certain that as recently as two weeks ago, Korra had been describing Odyn as insufferable to both him and Bolin in separate conversations. He filed the observation away and returned to his practice.
By the time Mako called the team into a huddle, the morning light had moved from pale to gold through the arena's high windows, and Pabu had claimed Bolin's shoulder as a resting place with the authority of someone whose decisions were not up for discussion.
"Fire Ferrets," Mako said, with the particular energy of someone who had been waiting all week to say this, "first match is tonight."
Bolin fist-pumped. Korra stood up straighter.
"We haven't been together long," Mako continued, "but I'll say this — we've never been this sharp. Any of us." He looked around the small circle. "With the technique work that Odyn and Sarai have been putting us through since Korra came back — reaction time, footwork, adapting mid-fight—" He shook his head. "We're ready. I really believe that."
"We're ready," Korra and Bolin said, more or less simultaneously.
Mako grinned. Then he looked toward the two dark elves who had migrated to the edge of the room, and gestured. "Come on. Get over here."
Odyn looked at the gesture, then at himself, then at Sarai.
Sarai was already giggling.
"He means us," she said.
"I assumed he was pointing at someone behind us."
"He's not."
"I can see that."
Sarai put both hands on his back and pushed. He was significantly larger than her and moved approximately two feet before planting, but the direction of travel had been established, and with the resigned sigh of a man who has long since accepted that his younger sister will win most arguments, he walked the rest of the way on his own.
"Are you sure you want us in a team huddle?" Odyn asked, not sarcastically — genuinely checking.
"Obviously," Bolin said.
Odyn looked at the circle of faces — open, earnest, waiting. Something moved across his expression that was quieter than what usually lived there. He stepped in.
The huddle closed.
Mako looked around at all of them — at his brother, at the Avatar he'd met in a courtyard barely a month ago, at the two dark elves who had walked into their lives through a cloud of equalist smoke and changed everything about their odds — and felt something he didn't have a clean word for.
This is a team, he thought, with some surprise. This is actually a team.
Asami arrived with the uniforms twenty minutes later, Khanna one step behind her, both of them carrying the kind of entry-level confidence that came from knowing they were delivering good news.
The shirts were clean and well-made, the Future Industries logo crisp and professional at the chest. Mako held his up and looked at it with an expression that started as skepticism and didn't quite reach it.
"These look great," he said, and meant it.
"You look great," Asami told him, and also meant it.
Sarai, in the process of examining her own shirt, leaned sideways toward Korra and spoke at a volume calibrated for exactly two listeners.
"Is it just me, or is Mako being a little... awkward around Khanna?"
Korra glanced over. Mako was very deliberately not looking in Khanna's direction while also clearly being aware of exactly where she was.
"It's not just you," she confirmed.
Bolin closed his eyes and nodded with the gravity of a man providing expert testimony. "Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm."
Sarai tilted her head thoughtfully. "Well. He can hardly blame himself, I suppose. Khanna is beautiful. So is Asami." A small, genuinely sympathetic pause. "Poor man doesn't know which direction to look."
Bolin produced a single dramatic tear. "At least save some of the ladies for the rest of us, Mako."
"He can't hear you," Korra said.
"I know. I'm just saying it into the universe."
Meanwhile, several feet away, Odyn had been very quietly watching Korra's face during the moment when Mako and Asami exchanged their small, affectionate greeting — the way she'd looked and then looked somewhere else, and the way her jaw had tightened for about two seconds before relaxing back to normal. He had filed this away the first time he'd noticed it. He had now filed it away three times. He was beginning to think it warranted a folder.
Sarai elbowed him.
He looked down at her with a warning expression.
She looked up at him with an expression that communicated: I know what you know and I also know that you know that I know, and I am enjoying this.
"A-Ahem," he said, looking elsewhere. "It's not like that."
"Of course not," she agreed, in a tone that suggested the opposite of agreement.
The match was scheduled for that evening, which left the afternoon to itself.
Mako and Asami claimed the afternoon first, walking out together with the ease of people who had established a rhythm, and Bolin watched them go with approximately five distinct emotions crossing his face before he settled on philosophical acceptance.
He turned.
He was going to say something to Korra.
Korra was already looking at Odyn.
"Weren't you going to show me that thing—" she started, gesturing vaguely.
Odyn read her like a sign. "Right. Let's go." He walked toward the door and held it, glancing back once with an expression that was dry and knowing and also, underneath it, genuinely amused.
Korra grabbed her bag and followed, pausing long enough to bow apologetically at Bolin. "Sorry — maybe later? See you tonight!"
And then they were gone.
Bolin stood in the emptied gym and looked at the door.
"...Huh," he said, to no one.
"Bolin?"
He turned. Sarai had appeared at his elbow — not having snuck up on him exactly, more having arrived in the specific way that small people could when a person was sufficiently distracted. She was looking up at him with an expression that was difficult to categorize: thoughtful, a little uncertain, and doing a poor job of hiding that it was trying.
He stepped back. "Uh—! Ms. Sarai! Hey, what's—"
"I know it's not the same as going with Korra," she said, getting it out before she lost the nerve. Her hands had migrated behind her back. She was looking at the middle distance slightly to the left of his face. "But I'd be happy to go somewhere with you, if you're up for it."
Bolin stared at her.
Khanna, behind them both, made a noise like someone trying very hard not to laugh.
"You can relax," Sarai added, apparently reading his face correctly. "I'd just like a tour of downtown. The parts only you know about."
The parts only he knew about. He had been leading Korra on a mental tour of those exact same places for weeks in hypothetical terms that he had never actually executed, and here was Sarai, actual person, actually asking, with her hands folded behind her back and her mismatched eyes looking at him with a level of genuine interest that was either the most normal thing in the world or the most terrifying, and he was not yet sure which.
"YEAH, THAT'LL WORK," he said, at a volume slightly above what the situation required.
"Tomorrow?" she asked.
He nodded. Rapidly.
She leaned forward slightly — just enough — and the smile she gave him had no performance in it at all. It was simply warm, and it was simply his.
"So it's a date, then?"
He nodded again. Still rapid.
"See you tomorrow, Bolin!" She skipped away, waving.
Khanna drew level with him and placed one hand on his shoulder with the solemn deliberation of a person imparting actual wisdom.
"She really does like you," she said, quietly. "More than you know. Take care of her."
Then she too was gone, and Bolin stood in the middle of the empty gym and felt the universe doing something very specific to him.
He had liked Korra. He still did, a little, the way you liked someone who had become the background assumption of your days. But Korra, he was starting to understand, liked someone else. And Sarai was—
Sarai had just asked him on a date and he had said yes and she had smiled at him and he had not yet found the floor again.
"Okay," he said aloud, to the empty gym. "Okay."
◈
That evening, in the brothers' attic apartment, Pabu submitted to a bath under protest and Mako made dinner and Bolin stared at a fixed point in the middle distance that the room did not technically contain.
"What do you think about Korra?" Bolin asked. "In a girlfriend kind of way."
Mako didn't look up from the pot. "She's great. But Asami makes more sense for me."
Bolin turned. "I was asking for me."
"I know, that's what I thought you meant."
A brief, complicated silence.
"Well?"
Mako set down the ladle. He leaned against the counter. He gave the question the actual consideration it deserved, which was something he was better at doing when Bolin waited him out long enough to get there.
"I don't know, Bo. I'm not sure it'd be a great idea." He paused. "She's a good athlete. She's a good Avatar. She's a good friend to have. But..." He trailed off.
Bolin sat up. "But what?"
"Did you notice how she and Odyn were today?"
Bolin thought about the morning in the gym. About how Korra had looked when Odyn approved of her form. About how quickly she had come up with a reason to leave with him.
"I figured they just... worked out their differences," he said.
"Maybe." Mako's expression was thoughtful and a little reluctant, the face of someone verbalizing a theory they would rather have been wrong about. "But the change was pretty sudden. Something happened between them. On the island, maybe, or after. And the way she looks at him now is..." He shook his head. "I'm not certain, Bo. But I think there might be something there."
Bolin was quiet for a moment.
He thought about it honestly. And honestly, he could see it — now that Mako had said it out loud. He could see how Korra had reached for Odyn's company with the instinct of someone who had stopped having to think about it. He could see how Odyn's attention, which was usually reserved and measured and distributed with the care of someone who had learned not to spend it carelessly, had been different in the gym this morning. More present. More personal.
He exhaled.
"Yeah," he said. "I think you might be right."
"Anyway," Mako said, returning to the pot, "you said something happened after we left?"
Bolin came back to the present. "About that." He shifted. "You know Sarai?"
A longer pause than strictly necessary.
"She, uh... asked me out."
Mako turned around.
"She what?"
"She asked me out! For a tour of downtown! Tomorrow! And she called it a date! And I said yes and now I don't know what to do because I like Korra but Sarai asked me out and—"
Mako crossed the room, put an arm around his brother's shoulders, and guided him to the nearest sitting surface with the gentle authority of someone who had navigated interpersonal crises before and understood that the first step was getting the other person to stop moving.
"Okay," he said. "Tell me about Sarai."
Bolin told him. He told him about the way she had looked at him when she asked, and about the hands clasped behind her back, and about the smile that had been entirely without performance, and about what Khanna had said when she left. And as he talked, he noticed that what had felt like a problem in the abstract was starting to feel, in the telling, less like a problem and more like something that had already, quietly, made up its mind about itself.
"She really is incredible," he said, at the end of it, and he sounded faintly surprised by his own certainty.
Mako smiled. "Yeah," he said. "She sounds like it."
◈
On Air Temple Island, in the early afternoon light, ring-tailed lemurs moved through the branches of the courtyard trees, and Jinora and Ikki were feeding them with the specific patience of people who knew which ones would come to your hand and which would make you wait.
Korra sat with them and did not look at the lemurs and thought very hard about not thinking about something.
"So," Jinora said, with a conversational air that was not particularly convincing, "how are things going with the tall dreamy dark elf?"
Korra's head came up like a startled animal. "What— No— We're not— He's my teacher, he's like—"
"He's not like Dad," Ikki said helpfully. "Dad doesn't make your face do that."
"My face isn't doing anything."
"Your face is doing several things," Jinora said, feeding a lemur with great serenity. "Korra, it's okay. You can say it. We won't tell anyone."
"There's nothing to—" Korra stopped. Breathed. Looked at the two of them. "Okay," she said, with the tone of someone making a strategic retreat to a defensible position. "Let's say, hypothetically, that there was... a possibility that I might... have some feelings. For a person. Hypothetically. What would you do?"
Jinora set down the fruit bowl and gave the question the serious consideration it deserved. "Well," she said finally, "I did read this historical saga where the heroine falls in love with the enemy general's son—"
"Tell me," Korra said, leaning forward.
"She rode a dragon into battle and burned down the whole country, and then she jumped into a volcano."
A beat.
"...It was very romantic."
Ikki raised her hand. "I have a better idea! You brew a love potion made of rainbows and sunsets, and when true lovers drink it they grow wings and fly to a magical castle in the sky and get married and eat clouds with spoons and use stars as ice cubes in their moonlight punch—"
"—forever and ever and ever," Korra finished, flatly.
"Forever and ever and ever," Ikki confirmed, airbending upward in a spiral of enthusiasm.
Korra sat with this information for a moment.
"Suddenly," she said, "the volcano makes a lot more sense."
Pema's laugh came from the path behind them — warm and unhurried, the laugh of someone who has been listening long enough to have context.
Korra turned. "How long have you been standing there?"
"Long enough." Pema walked forward, settled herself on the bench beside Korra with the ease of someone who had done this before — sat beside a girl who was trying to figure out something large and would not say it directly and needed the door opened from the other side. "I went through something very similar once. When Tenzin and I were finding our way to each other."
Ikki's eyes went wide. "Dad was in love with someone else before you?"
"He was," Pema said simply.
"What did you do?" Korra asked.
Pema smiled at a memory that had had twenty years to become gentle. "For the longest time? Nothing. I was so afraid of saying it wrong, of losing what we already had. But watching the person who was right for me spend his life going in the wrong direction... that eventually became more painful than the fear of speaking." She looked at Korra. "So I hung my chin out and I told him. No guarantees, no safety net. Just the truth."
"Wooooow," the three girls said, in a single voice.
Jinora and Ikki drifted away shortly after, in the direction of the lemurs and their own conversation, and Pema touched Korra's arm gently.
"You do like him," Pema said. Not a question.
Korra's eyes moved to the middle distance. "I don't... not like him," she said carefully. "I do. I just..." She pressed her lips together. "What if he thinks it's weird? What if it changes things? We've built something real and I don't want to—"
"I think," Pema said, "that young man has already decided something about you. I don't know what he'd say if you asked him. But I'd be very surprised if the answer was what you're afraid of." She squeezed Korra's arm and stood. "Just tell him the truth, Korra. The rest follows from there."
She walked away.
Korra sat with the ring-tailed lemurs and the cooling afternoon light and the information she'd just been given, and she thought about it very carefully, and she came to a decision that felt, oddly, like she had been walking toward it for longer than she'd known.
Alright, she thought. Tonight.
◈
The pro-bending arena that evening was exactly what it always was and also something different — fuller, louder, the specific electricity of a crowd that had been waiting for months for something to actually happen and was ready for it now. The lights over the ring were brilliant. The water below them was still.
"Folks, after a year of waiting, the Pro-Bending Championship is finally here—"
The announcer's voice was almost unnecessary. The crowd was already providing its own narrative.
"—and introducing our first team: the Future Industries Fire Ferrets!"
The cheer was real. Korra came out of the tunnel and into the light and waved, and felt the sound of it land in her chest like something physical. She liked this. She had not expected to like this — she had arrived in Republic City prepared to train and do her duty and be the Avatar, and she had gotten all of those things, but she had also gotten this, and it surprised her every time.
She looked up at the balcony.
Odyn was there, leaning on the rail with his arms crossed, watching the ring with the focused attention he gave to everything. His siblings and Khanna stood alongside him. He registered her wave with a nod and a small, contained upward movement of his mouth that she had learned, over the past weeks, to interpret accurately. For him, that was a grin.
She turned back to the ring feeling approximately one hundred and twelve percent ready.
"So you actually came," Sarai said, somewhere to Odyn's left, with a tone of profound satisfaction.
"I was going to come regardless."
"Right." A pause filled with a smile he could feel without seeing. "Nothing to do with Korra."
"It has to do with pro-bending."
"And Korra."
"Sarai."
"Brother."
Roy, on his other side, had the diplomatic wisdom to look at the ring and say nothing. Khanna examined her fingernails.
Odyn looked at the ring and very deliberately did not think about the fact that watching Korra move through a match — the way she read the space, the way she adjusted in real time to things no one had trained her to anticipate, the way she had taken everything he'd tried to show her and made it entirely, recognizably hers — was one of the more privately impressive things he had observed in a long time.
He was very good at not thinking about things.
The referee's whistle cut through the noise.
"Round One!"
What followed was, by any reasonable standard, a masterclass in small-team coordination.
The Fire Ferrets moved through the Rabaroos the way a well-spoken argument moved through a counterpoint — not by overwhelming force alone, but by reading where the force wasn't, and being there instead. Mako anchored the center, fire tight and controlled, never more than what was needed. Bolin worked the flanks with earthbending that had gotten noticeably faster in the past month — not faster in the mechanical sense, but faster in the sense of his decisions being quicker, the gap between reading a situation and responding to it smaller than it had been. And Korra — Korra was doing something with her waterbending that Odyn had not seen her do before, something fluid and adaptive and unpredictable that had the Rabaroos constantly a half-second behind where they expected her to be.
"The Ferrets advance into Rabaroo territory and are holding nothing back — Korra comes to Bolin's defense and water-whacks Umi back into zone two — the Fire Ferrets take round one!"
The crowd's response was enormous and immediate.
"Hm," Odyn said.
Sarai looked at him sidelong. "Was that an impressed 'hm'?"
"It was an evaluative 'hm'."
"It sounded impressed."
"—Round two!" the announcer called, and Odyn very usefully did not respond.
The second round was tighter — the Rabaroos had adjusted, and for a minute or two it looked like the adjustment might hold — and then Korra made a decision mid-movement that Odyn recognized as something he had drilled with her three days ago, a lateral redirection she had gotten wrong four times before she got it right, and she got it right now under match conditions, and he found himself nodding before he had decided to nod.
"Right there," he said, quietly, to no one.
"Impressed," Sarai said.
"Round three!"
The third round was not a contest. It was the Fire Ferrets deciding, collectively, that they had spent enough time being careful, and demonstrating what happened when they were not. Mako. Bolin. Korra. The Rabaroos were in the water before the crowd had quite finished processing the sequence of events.
"All three rounds to the Future Industries Fire Ferrets!"
The sound that went through the arena was the sound of a crowd that had been given what it came for.
◈
The locker room after a win was a specific kind of good. Not the loud, performed good of celebration, but the quieter, more satisfied good of something actually accomplished — gear coming off, the specific relief of bodies that had been working hard getting to stop, people who had trusted each other under pressure returning to the ordinary space of being people again.
"We were really connecting out there," Mako said, and he was smiling in the way he rarely smiled, the way that didn't have anything calculating in it.
The door opened and Odyn, Sarai, and Khanna came through it, and Korra was on her feet and across the room before she had entirely consciously decided to move.
She hugged him.
It was not a tentative hug. It was the hug of someone who had decided, sometime in the last twelve hours, to be honest about several things.
The room went briefly silent with the specific quality of people who are very interested in pretending they are not watching something.
Odyn, for his part, recovered in approximately two seconds and accepted the embrace with the same quality of quiet presence he brought to most things — not stiff, not performative, just there.
"It's all thanks to your training," Korra said, pulling back slightly but not entirely stepping away.
"Most of it was yours," he said, and meant it.
Asami arrived with Pabu and congratulations and a kiss on Mako's cheek. Sarai found Bolin, and the look she gave him was the specific look of someone who had been in the stands watching him and thought about several things during that time.
"You were incredible out there," she told him.
He rubbed the back of his head and grinned the grin of someone who had accepted, sometime during the third round, that he was perhaps in the process of developing feelings that were more complex than simple.
And then Korra looked at Odyn again, and the thing she had decided earlier was still very much decided, and she took a breath.
"Thank you," she said. "For all of it. I don't think I would've gotten this far without you."
He looked at her steadily. "When you commit to something, nothing stops you," he said. "I just provided—"
"I know what you're going to say." She shifted her weight. Her voice went quieter. "The thing is, I feel like we've been connecting a lot. Not just in training." She stopped. Started again. "I want to spend time with you. Outside of training, outside of fighting people and chasing chi-blockers. Just... time."
Odyn looked at her with the expression of someone assembling the final piece of a picture they had been looking at for a while. "Haven't we been spending quite a bit of time together already?"
"We have. But I mean—" She stopped again. The words were right there. She had decided she was going to say them. She said them.
"Odyn, I like you. I think we're meant for each other."
The room, which had been conducting itself with admirable discretion, failed to maintain that discretion. There was a sound from Bolin's direction that suggested significant emotion. Mako appeared to be examining the far wall.
Korra was looking at the floor, her cheeks burning.
Sarai opened her mouth.
Odyn gave her a look.
She closed her mouth, then opened it again. "Whew, get a room you two."
"Sarai."
She giggled.
Odyn took Korra by the hand — gently, carefully, with the intention of someone giving a person the time and privacy they deserved — and said, simply, "Sorry, everyone. Back in a moment," and led her out.
"Take your time!" Sarai called after them.
◈
The dock outside the arena was quiet at this hour — the water dark and clean, the city lights making long lines across the surface, the air holding that particular quality of early evening that was cooler than afternoon and not yet as cold as night.
Odyn had released her hand when they came through the door, and they stood a few feet apart in the comfortable way of people who had learned the shape of each other's silences.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Korra studied the water. He was aware of her the way he had become aware of most things in the past weeks — not as surveillance, but as an ongoing attention that had stopped being a decision and started being something else.
"Alright," he said at last. "Korra, what did you mean by—"
She kissed him.
It was not careful or calculated. It was simply the most direct possible answer to the question he had been about to ask, arrived at with the Avatar's characteristic preference for action over explanation. He was still for one moment — surprised, genuinely — and then he decided, quite rationally, that arguing with it would be neither productive nor honest. He accepted it. He felt her relax when he did.
When they separated, the city was exactly the same as it had been and also, somehow, slightly different.
He looked at her.
Those blue eyes. He had spent weeks watching them — through training and fights and long conversations and difficult silences — and he had never quite gotten used to the quality of them, the way they were direct and open and somehow seemed to contain more of her than the rest of her face did. He shook his head very slightly, as if clearing something.
"I'm not angry," he said. "I want to be clear about that first. Surprised, yes. But not angry." A pause. "Now tell me. Properly."
She exhaled, and the nervousness that had been building in her all afternoon came out with it, leaving behind something calmer.
"Every time I think about you," she said, "I feel it. That specific thing, the one that doesn't have a good name yet. I get excited when we're going to spend time together. When we're training, when we're walking, when we're just sitting somewhere not doing anything in particular. When you saved me, I—" She stopped. "I can't get you out of my head. I tried to figure out if it was something else, something simpler. But I know what this is." She met his eyes. "I really do think we're meant for each other."
He was quiet for a moment that was long enough to feel significant and not long enough to be unkind.
"You understand what this means," he said carefully. "What it would mean. People who hate my kind — and there are many, and some of them are powerful — they would direct that hatred toward you too. Your reputation as Avatar would be questioned. You'd face things I wouldn't wish on anyone." He was not saying it to discourage her. He was saying it because she deserved the complete picture, and offering her anything less would have been its own kind of dishonesty. "You understand that."
She reached up and held his face in both hands, the way she had before, on the steps of City Hall. There was no uncertainty in her eyes.
"How could I turn my back," she said, "on the man who saved my life? And the man I love?"
He stared at her.
And then, slowly, something happened to his expression that very few people had ever seen — something that came from deeper than the controlled, measured surface he presented to the world, something that had been waiting behind a door that had been locked for a very long time.
He laughed. Quietly. Not at her — with her, or rather with the specific improbable fact of her, the fact that this particular person existed and had looked at him and decided, without ambiguity, what she thought.
"I don't know how to do this," he said. His voice was different than usual — quieter, more careful, something underneath it that was genuinely new. "I've never—" He stopped. Started again. "Could you teach me? How to be someone's— How to show someone—"
"Yes," she said. "I'd be very happy to."
He breathed out. A weight moved. She could see it go.
"Then yes," he said. "I like you too, Korra." A pause that was almost shy, which was not a word she would have applied to him before tonight. "Very much."
She was smiling so widely she could feel it at the corners of her eyes.
"Now—" he said, and something in his tone shifted again, returning to something closer to his usual register but warmer, with a quality she hadn't heard in it before tonight, "—I believe I owe you this."
"Owe me wha—"
He kissed her.
It was entirely unlike hers — deliberate, certain, unhurried, his hand at her back, everything intentional. She went still with surprise and then she stopped being still, and the dock and the water and the city lights and the whole vast noise of Republic City went somewhere peripheral and stayed there.
When they finally separated, the first thing she was aware of was that her eyes were still closed, and the second thing was that his face was very close to hers.
"Does that answer your question?" he asked.
She opened her eyes and looked at him from approximately four inches away.
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I think it does."
◈
Narook's Seaweed Noodlery was, at this particular hour on this particular evening, occupied by two separate pairs of people who had each, independently, arrived at the conclusion that noodles were appropriate to the occasion. The proprietor had seen stranger things.
Korra and Odyn were in the corner booth — of course the corner booth, with Odyn positioned where he could see the room without obviously watching his sister's table. Sarai and Bolin were across the room, which was close enough to be comfortable and far enough to be private, which was a configuration Odyn had not established on purpose, exactly, but which was what it was.
Korra rested her chin in her hand and watched him scan the room with the reflexive attention that was so deeply habitual he clearly did not notice he was doing it.
"You planned this," she said.
He gave her the expression he deployed when he was doing something and preferred not to discuss it. "I like corner booths."
"With a direct line of sight to your sister's table."
"With a pleasant view of the kitchen."
Korra looked at the kitchen. It was a kitchen.
"Odyn."
"Korra."
"You're watching your sister on our first date."
He had the decency to look very slightly caught. "I am being appropriately attentive to the room." A beat. "Which includes the table where my sister is sitting." He paused again, and then something warmer moved into his expression. "Besides. I wanted somewhere quiet for us." He reached across the table and his hand settled over hers with a certainty that was entirely new and also felt, somehow, like it had always been going to happen. "Our first proper date."
She looked at his hand over hers and felt the warmth of it and thought: yeah, okay, this is real.
Across the room, Bolin had launched into a story about pro-bending with the full-body commitment he brought to stories he cared about, and Sarai was watching him the way people watched something they found genuinely wonderful — not performing interest, not being polite, just actually there.
"And then," Bolin was saying, "I realized — sometimes the best things in life aren't the ones you planned. They're the ones that just kind of happen."
Sarai's expression went soft in a way that was different from how her expressions usually were. "Like earthbending lessons?" she asked.
"Like—" He stopped, the thing he wanted to say arriving in full, and the room not quite being the right room for it yet. "Like earthbending lessons," he finished, and filed the rest away for the park, for the view of the whole city, for a moment that was not shared with a dining room full of strangers.
Sarai tilted her head. She had heard the pause. She smiled at him in a way that said: I heard it. It's okay. I'll wait.
At the corner booth, Korra had just demonstrated her noodle technique in a way that made Odyn laugh hard enough that she had to pat him firmly on the back.
"Death by noodles," she said. "Imagine the disgrace."
"I would die," he said, still catching his breath, "genuinely happy."
She looked at him — laughing, unguarded, all the weight he usually carried set down for a minute — and thought: there he is. That's who's been in there this whole time.
"You know," she said, more quietly, "I really like this version of you."
He looked at her.
"What version?"
"The one who's just a person. Who's having dinner and laughing at a bad joke and doesn't have to watch every angle all at once." She turned her hand over under his. "I want you to get to be that, sometimes. With me."
He looked at their joined hands for a long moment.
"I'm not sure I know how," he said. "It's been a long time since I let myself..."
"I know. That's okay." She squeezed once. "We're figuring it out."
He looked at her — really looked, the way he had been carefully not looking for several weeks now — and let himself.
"Yes," he said. "We are."
◈
Across the city, in a quiet corner booth at Kwong's Cuisine, a different kind of figuring out was in progress.
Asami had chosen the booth with the same consideration she brought to most things — private, but not isolated, with enough ambient warmth to make honesty feel less exposed. She had thought about this conversation for a week. She had thought about whether to have it, and what to say, and what she actually wanted, and whether what she actually wanted was something she could say out loud. She had arrived, finally, at the conclusion that she could.
The tea arrived. Steam rose from three cups.
Mako looked between them — between Asami, composed and deliberate and watching him with something that was not its usual warmth but something more careful, more considered — and Khanna, who had the expression of someone who had done the tactical math on this situation three steps ahead of everyone else and had arrived, already, at a number of very uncomfortable conclusions.
"I've seen the way you look at her," Asami said, to Mako. Gently. Directly. "And I've seen the way you try not to."
"Asami—" Mako started.
"And," she continued, turning to Khanna, "I've seen the way you respect what already exists. The way you keep your distance because you think it's the right thing to do." She looked at both of them. "That's exactly why I wanted to have this conversation."
Khanna's composure was doing real work. "Asami, I would never—"
"I know," Asami said. "That's not what I'm saying." She took a breath. "I'm saying that sometimes feelings develop that don't follow the rules we thought they would. And ignoring them doesn't make them simpler. It just makes everyone smaller."
The silence that followed had the quality of a room changing shape.
"Are you breaking up with me?" Mako asked, his voice quieter than usual.
"No," she said. "I'm suggesting something more complicated than that." She looked at Khanna. "And more honest."
What followed was careful, and slow, and conducted with a level of mutual respect that surprised all three of them in different ways. Asami spoke about what she had seen and what she had thought and what she was, now, offering — not as a sacrifice, not as capitulation, but as a genuine choice made by someone who had thought hard enough about her own heart to know what it actually contained. Mako listened, and was quiet, and asked questions that were real questions, and Khanna sat with the conversation the way she sat with hard tactical problems — thoroughly, without flinching.
"I don't want either of you to feel like something to be hidden," Mako said finally.
"Neither do I," Asami agreed. "We take it slowly. We communicate. We check in." She looked at both of them. "This only works if we're all genuinely in it. No exceptions."
Khanna looked at her tea. She looked at Mako. She looked at Asami, who was watching her with an expression of open, patient expectation.
"I have questions," she said at last. "About what this actually means. About boundaries and expectations and how we navigate the rest of the world."
"Good," Asami said. "So do I. That's what lunch is for."
The waiter arrived with the first course. The three of them looked at it, and at each other, and began the careful, necessary work of honesty.
◈
In the historical district, Roy was explaining the significance of a pre-war fountain to three people, two of whom were listening with academic interest and one of whom was approximately six inches off the ground without appearing to notice.
"The stonework here predates the Hundred Year War by at least a generation," Roy said, tracing the carved lines with one hand. "You can see both airbending and earthbending influence in the way the channels were shaped — water flowing two directions at once, which shouldn't work but does because of the specific geometry—"
"That's so fascinating," Ikki said, at a volume calibrated to suggest she found Roy himself very fascinating and was exercising restraint.
Behind them, Pema leaned toward Tenzin. "She reminds me of someone," she murmured.
Tenzin tugged at his collar.
Roy, to his credit, had the remarkable quality of acknowledging Ikki's enthusiasm entirely genuinely while redirecting it toward the subject at hand with a grace that suggested he was aware of exactly what was happening and had decided, with great care, how to handle it. He was neither cold nor encouraging. He was simply warm and respectful and pointed the conversation, consistently, toward things it was appropriate to be a conversation about.
"The integration of all four nations' styles is really what makes Republic City special," he was saying. "From the beginning, the idea was that different peoples could build something better together than any of them could alone."
"Unity," Ikki said, with the tone of someone discovering a very important word. "Do you think that's why you became captain of the city guard?"
Roy considered it seriously, as he considered most things. "Partly. Mostly it was about protecting people. When you've seen what happens to people who aren't protected — when they're left without anyone watching their back — the work becomes less about duty and more about necessity."
A quiet fell over the group that was slightly different from the usual quiet.
Jinora noticed it. Pema noticed it. Even Meelo paused his ongoing examination of a nearby decorative column.
Roy was talking about something real, and they all knew it.
"Anyway," he said, redirecting with the smooth ease of long practice, "the fountain itself was actually—"
"Could you tell me more about the city guard sometime?" Ikki asked. "For cultural studies."
Roy smiled — the specific smile of someone who was being gracious and also, somewhere underneath, genuinely fond of the person being gracious at. "Of course," he said. "When you're older and ready for it, I think you'd find a great deal worth knowing."
When you're older.
Ikki heard it. She processed it with the intelligence she had and didn't always show, and she was quiet for a moment, and then she said: "Okay," with the simplicity of someone who had received an honest answer and decided to take it.
Pema watched her youngest daughter settle back to earth, literally and otherwise, and thought: she's going to be remarkable when she gets there.
Tenzin exhaled.
Jinora patted his arm.
"You're fine, Dad," she said.
◈
The evening found its way toward closing. The noodle shop began to empty. Republic City settled into its later, quieter register, the streets still busy but differently busy — more purposeful, less ambient.
Korra and Odyn walked back to the arena side by side. Their hands were close. Neither of them had quite decided what to do about that yet, and both of them had decided not to rush it.
"Today was good," she said.
"It was," he agreed.
"The match was good. The noodles were good." She glanced at him. "This was good."
He looked at her with the expression she had started to be able to read — the one that was warmer than his default, that was something he had been practiced at not showing for a long time and was, carefully, beginning to show again.
"Yes," he said. "It was."
She bumped her shoulder against his arm.
He didn't say anything. But he also didn't move away.
The lights of the arena appeared ahead of them, and inside it their friends were waiting — Mako and Bolin and Asami and Sarai and Khanna, each of them in the middle of something, each of them figuring it out one step at a time, in a city full of noise and history and the specific complicated beauty of things that were being built.
Korra looked at the lights and then at the man walking beside her and thought about futures and about three faces she saw in dreams and about what it felt like to be at the very beginning of something enormous.
Yeah, she thought. This is how it starts.
She reached over.
She took his hand.
He looked down at their joined hands, and then up at her, and the thing that moved across his face was unhurried and unguarded and entirely real.
They walked the rest of the way together.
◈
End of Chapter Three, Part I.
Ending Theme:

♪ Ending Theme — All Squads Relieved (Bleach Ending 3)
The screen dims.
The opening guitar riff comes in gently — the kind of melody that feels like the end of something and the beginning of something else in the same breath, like an exhale after a long held tension. The black fades slowly.
The first image:
Korra and Odyn, not posed, not dramatic — just walking. A side street somewhere in the city, evening light on the stone, their hands almost but not quite touching. She is saying something and he is listening with his full attention, the way he always listened, and then she says whatever the punchline was and his head dips and the corner of his mouth moves and she grins.
The image is warm.
The next, drifting in from the left:
Bolin and Sarai, at a noodle shop table. She is attempting chopsticks with limited success. He is leaning over to correct her grip. Their hands stay together for one beat longer than the lesson requires, and neither of them mentions it.
From the right:
Mako, Asami, Khanna — the three of them in a quieter corner of Kwong's, the first course cleared away, all three talking at once with the specific animated quality of people who have stopped being careful and are now actually saying things. Mako is laughing. Asami is watching both of them with an expression of warm, accomplished satisfaction. Khanna is making a point with one hand while the other rests on the table close to both of theirs.
Center:
Roy and Ikki, at the fountain in the historical district. She is airbending something — demonstrating a form, or trying to — and he is watching with the serious-faced attention he gave to all earnest attempts. Then she gets it right, and his expression breaks into a genuine grin, and she goes six inches off the ground.
And then:
Jinora, alone on a rooftop, sketchbook in hand, drawing something the camera doesn't see. Content. Occupied. Already, clearly, thinking about something much larger than the current page.
Tenzin and Pema, watching their children from the doorway of Air Temple Island, his arm around her shoulders, her head against his arm. Not talking. Just watching.
All of the images come together now — not quickly, the way action sequences assembled, but slowly, layering over each other like a city seen from height, each life small in itself and enormous in company.
The guitar reaches its quietest measure.
And then the final frame:
Korra's hand in Odyn's, seen from below — just their hands, against the warm dark of the evening sky, the city spread out behind them in light.
Held.
Then darkness.
Then just the melody, finishing itself.
Then the title, simple and clean:
Flame Eyed Bender
◈
To be continued...
Next chapter — Chapter Four: The Spirit of Competition — Part II.