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Asami Sato was an empath, a captain of industry, and an engineer. These three things, unfortunately, did not often occur together, but for Asami, they all came naturally from her core. And part of what made her so successful at them, and with life in general, was this:
She was excellent at understanding patterns.
When a need was being unmet by the market, Asami was always among the first to swoop in. When a machine was malfunctioning or an entire assembly line was falling behind, she could examine every component and hone right in to the source of the problem. And when she saw somebody struggling, she’d be the first person to lend a hand, a shoulder, a kind word.
That wasn’t to say she didn’t have her blind spots. But truly, who out there can truly be objective when it comes to their own motivations, their own relationships?
Asami was wise enough to know that she could not be.
And so, it was some surprise when she realized, amid the noise and chaos of her and Korra’s lives, that there was a distinctive pattern to their intimacy.
For about a week each month, around the full moon, they’d keep each other awake for hours, nearly every night—Asami’s fatigue permitting. Whereas, two weeks later, barring nightmares, they’d both sleep through the night.
At first, Asami assumed it had something to do with their cycles, and considered the matter settled. But a disruption to that after few stressful months traveling around the Earth Kingdom by airship put the lie to that. The most plausible explanation discounted, what could it be? Was it their diet? Pay periods at work? Disruptions to the electrical system in their apartment?
One by one, Asami’s increasingly-tenuous conjectures fell to experimental evidence or simple common sense. No, the upstairs neighbors flowers had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t Naga, it wasn’t any difference in the air quality at work, and it didn’t seem to be something Korra even noticed. As to assessing her own motivations… nothing stopped her from deliberately instigating romance, but the fact that it had to be deliberate one week a month was baffling.
Perhaps it was one of life’s little mysteries? The result of so many seemingly-disconnected variables that she would never pinpoint a cause? Perhaps it was a coincidence, or merely all in her mind?
It wasn’t precisely a terrible thing, either, depending on how she responded to it. Knowing the pattern, recognizing it, gave her a few days each month that she prompted herself to make romantic. Candles, low music, sweet rice wine… the excuse to slow down and linger, to truly appreciate each other in excruciating, passionate detail.
It was an optimal solution—but that didn’t move the problem into the ‘resolved’ column in Asami’s mind. On some level, she continued to wonder, even as time passed and her strategy became a pattern all its own.
Then, one unexpected evening, the answer presented itself.
On a nearly-moonless night, two days before a planned evening of romance, the two of them lay in bed, not yet asleep. They were just far enough apart to not disturb each other as they shifted, and though Korra mostly had the blankets thrown off herself, her foot always found its way back under to rest against Asami’s leg.
A bright blue flash lit the room through their drawn curtains. A few moments later, another, red, shifting to orange. Cracks and barrages of sound rolled in shortly after.
Asami frowned, turning her questioning gaze to Korra. Another flash lit the room to see a similar look on Korra’s face, too. They turned, glancing out the window above their bed, but saw nothing out of sort. Only the cloudless, starry sky.
Together, they stood, moving to the main window, each of them pulling half of the thick curtains aside. Though the view of the Spirit Portal was part of the appeal of the apartment to begin with, the ethereal light blasting in at all hours didn’t exactly encourage sleep.
Tonight though, a fireworks display blossomed around the portal—the anniversary of the end of the Hundred Year War must’ve slipped her their minds. Spirits flitted and danced among the sparkling bursts—apparently, rather than being annoyed by it, the spirits that resided around the portal found it all tremendously entertaining. Violets and whites and yellows and reds flashed across the city, casting flickering shadows across spirit and vine, building and street.
And across the two women watching from their bedroom.
Korra’s arm slid around her back, resting on her waist. She watched the fireworks sparkling in the distance, but all the while became increasingly aware that Korra’s attention was split.
She kept turning to look at Asami.
Asami glanced over herself, at now the colors danced across the familiar contours of her skin, how the dim light of the portal and the fireworks themselves emphasized the features she had memorized in entirely different ways than she was used to… the sharpness of her cheeks, the set of her eyes, the shape of her lips…
“You’re smiling,” Korra said.
Asami chuckled, glancing at the window above their bed. The one they didn’t have thick curtains on—the one that could let in moonlight. Just enough light to see each other by—around the time it was full, at least.
It was an illuminating night, in more ways than one.
“You’re beautiful,” Asami finally said.
“You say that,” Korra chuckled, “but I’m just in sweats and a tank top. I get to see you in a nightgown, and with light like this…” She traced the back of her fingers along Asami’s arm.
Asami traced her fingers along Korra’s cheek, already resolved to install a night light within the next few days. “What do you say we get back to bed, make some fireworks of our own?”