The sailor and the journalist

1. The Assignment

A/N: This is a slowburn story with mature themes and eventual smut. I'll make sure to include warnings when the time comes.

***

"Asami, Mako, get in here!" A gruff-sounding Lin called from her office across the newsroom.

Asami was sitting at her desk sipping black coffee and reviewing a list of leads for her next story. Upon hearing her name, she put her notes aside and headed to Lin's office.

Mako strode over from his desk in the photography section and met Asami at the doorway. A sign on it read: Lin Beifong, Editor-in-Chief, The National Adventurer, though the door had been swung ajar in anticipation of their arrival.

Mako nodded good morning to Asami and gestured with his hand for her to proceed—ladies first. Nodding thanks, she entered.

"Good morning, Chief," Asami said.

"Hey Chief, how's it going?" Mako followed.

"Too early to tell – still working on my first cup of coffee. Ask me again halfway through my second," said Lin. She was seated at her desk with her arms folded at her chest, her face scrunched up as if she was thinking real hard about something.

Mako scratched the back of his head with a pencil he kept behind his ear. "You called?"

"Indeed. I have an assignment, a big one, cover potential if done with care."

The two young journalists straightened up, their interests piqued.

Lin pulled out a newspaper clipping from a manila folder and placed it atop her desk. Asami and Mako leaned in at the same time to study the piece and bumped heads before retracting back, rubbing the spot where they collided. This time, Asami offered up her hand in a chivalric gesture for Mako to take first look. It didn't go unnoticed by Lin, who crooked a half-smile.

When Mako was done, Asami had her turn. The clipping was a story from The Ocean City Gazette, a semi-regional newspaper in Southern California. The headline read: "Former swim champ sails around the world solo." The article was in the sports section and featured a black and white picture of a young woman atop her boat, staring broodily into the middle distance.

She found herself gazing at the picture awhile, studying the person in it, wondering what could be going on in her mind. She recognized the young woman, knew the story. Korra had risen to titanic fame as a teen Olympic gold medalist – a swimmer who had, still in her delicate youth, risen and fallen hard and fast, crashing and sinking though quickly forgotten. Four years later, turns out Korra's story wasn't over.

Asami's guts flurried at the thought of covering this potentially career-defining piece. She was twenty-three, fresh out of UC Berkeley's journalism MA program, and ravenous for a good story. It had distressed her father that she would lower herself so thoroughly to pursue a career in journalism, and at a liberal non-Ivy League school no less. But Asami could only be true to herself and follow her heart. To her, journalism was a noble profession, and so she took pride in her work, even if she had to work her way up to the more serious stories.

This one, though... Asami remembered secretly rooting for Korra on TV to win the gold medal years ago, and being so excited when she did. She blushed at the memory of it. It was a bit irrational, she realized in retrospect -- to root that hard for someone she didn't know – but nonetheless, she chalked it up to her affinity for admiring strong women.

Lin interrupted Asami's drifting thoughts: "It's a profile piece on Korra. Who is she now? What's her story? She was world-famous as a teen, disappears, and then shows up almost four years later in the C section of a Southern California hippie town newspaper."