Chapter I: Welcome to Republic City
The first thing Tohra registered was pain.
The second thing was dirt — specifically, the taste of it pressed against his lips.
He groaned, rolling onto his back with all the grace of a sack of bricks dropped from the upper atmosphere. Which, to be entirely fair to his dignity, was more or less what had just happened. His dark skin was dusted grey with pulverized earth, his head felt like someone had taken a boulder to it, and the crater he was lying in had the humble radius of a small swimming pool.
He blinked up at a pale blue sky he didn't recognize.
...That's not home.
No, it definitely wasn't. The air smelled different — sharp with salt and something mechanical, something burning underneath the scent of morning bread from a shop somewhere nearby. Strange sounds floated to him. Engines. Voices. A distant, rhythmic clanging of metal on metal. He had no idea where he was, and yet even through the fog of his rattled skull, a single thought blazed through with the focused clarity of a ki blast:
Winter. I have to find Winter.
He pressed himself up from the crater floor, arms trembling only slightly — more from surprise than any real weakness — and found himself in a wide street paved with grey stone. Tall, angular buildings flanked him on both sides, their facades decorated with sweeping curves of iron and glass that caught the morning light like scales. Electric lamps. Trolley lines strung overhead. People dressed in clothes he'd never seen before, though by now the modest crowd that had gathered around the odd, dark-skinned boy who had apparently fallen from the sky had mostly dispersed, chalk it up to urban indifference.
Almost everyone had left.
Almost.
"Hey, kid. You alright?"
The man crouched at the crater's rim wore the clothes of someone who worked with his hands — dark jacket thrown over a green shirt layered beneath a worn tan sweater, beige trousers, and simple black shoes that had seen a thousand deliveries. His expression sat somewhere between concern and the cautious wariness of a man who had learned not to be surprised by strange things in this city. He extended a hand down into the crater, and Tohra, after a moment's consideration, took it.
"...I suppose I am." He brushed himself off and immediately winced, pressing a palm to his temple. "My head is killing me, though."
The man studied him for a second, then reached into the large bag strapped to his shoulder and produced a paper-wrapped pack of ice. He held it out without ceremony.
"Here. Use this, kid."
Tohra blinked at the offering. Then — somewhat awkwardly, because gratitude had never been his most practiced skill — he took it and pressed it to his aching skull.
Cold. That actually helps.
"Thank... you, sir."
"No problem." The man straightened up and tilted his head, studying Tohra with the particular look of someone doing arithmetic in their head. The equation he was running, apparently, was: this teenager is enormous, is wearing what appears to be armor, has a tail, and just fell out of the sky. What do I do with that? He seemed to land on: ask politely.
"Hope this ain't too personal," he said, "but uh — where are you from, kid? Haven't seen anyone quite like you around here."
Tohra opened his mouth. Closed it. The instinct to explain himself had run headlong into the very real problem that he had no idea how to explain himself to someone who'd never heard of Saiyans.
"I'm from... pretty far away," he said carefully. "I—" Looking. "—I mean. Ahem. I am looking for someone. Perhaps you've seen her?"
The man raised an eyebrow, intrigued despite himself.
"This girl important to ya, kid?"
"Well, yes. Of course." Tohra squared his shoulders. "She's my only sister, after all."
Something in the man's expression softened. He exhaled through his nose — the universal sound of an adult who has decided to help a young person who is clearly in over their head, because the alternative is leaving them to their own devices, and that seems unwise.
"Maybe I can help ya find her, uh—?" He paused, realizing.
Realizing in turn that the man was waiting, Tohra straightened and extended his hand the way he'd seen people do in the books his mother had collected from distant worlds.
"Tohra. My name is Tohra."
The man smiled and shook it with the practiced warmth of someone who spent most of their life being decent to strangers on purpose.
"Most people call me Tony Pops. But you can just call me Tony." He let go of Tohra's hand and crossed his arms. "So — this sister of yours. What's she look like? I might be able to help."
Tohra thought. "Her name is Winter. Silver hair. Eyes like mine. Black tail." He gestured loosely at his own tail, which swayed behind him as if to demonstrate. "Tiger pelt around her waist. Armor, similar to what I'm wearing — she might've taken the top part off by now."
Tony thought about it. Turned it over. Set it down.
"...Sorry, kid. Can't say I've seen anyone matching that."
The quiet that followed had weight to it. Tohra's expression didn't crumble — he wasn't built for crumbling — but something in the lines of his face shifted inward, just slightly. The bravado of a boy trying to sound like he had a plan receding like a tide.
"Oh," he said. "Is that right."
It wasn't a question.
Tony looked at him for a long moment. Then:
"Tell ya what. Since you're not from around here — why don't I drive you into the city proper? You can look around, ask people there. Better odds than out here on the road."
Tohra's head came up fast, tail flicking with a life of its own.
"Really?!" He caught himself. "I — you would do that?"
"Course I would." Tony's smile was easy and unhurried. "Besides—" His gaze dropped to Tohra's chest plate with the polite but firm expression of a man pointing out that someone has spinach in their teeth. "—you're gonna want to find yourself some more normal looking clothes first. No civilian walks around in armor like that."
Tohra looked down at himself. At the blue and white chest armor that he'd worn since he could remember, custom fitted to his frame by his mother's own hands. It occurred to him, not for the first time in the past thirty minutes, that he had absolutely no idea what the social norms of this place were.
"...Ha." He reached up and unclipped the chest plate, revealing the plain black muscle shirt beneath. It clung with perhaps a little too much fidelity to the physique of someone who had spent their entire adolescence training, but it was at least not armor. "Guess that'll do."
"Guess that'll do," Tony agreed cheerfully, and jerked a thumb toward the truck idling a short distance up the road. "Come on. Hop in the back of the satsmobile. I've got deliveries to make going into the city anyway — it's no trouble."
Tohra paused. "I don't have anything to pay you with."
Tony waved a hand like he was brushing away a fly.
"On the house, kid. Looking out for young people like you — it's kind of a hobby of mine."
Tohra looked at this man — this stranger with kind eyes and a delivery truck, who had offered ice for his headache and a ride into an unfamiliar city without asking for a single thing in return — and found that he didn't quite have the words. Which was fine. Some things didn't need them.
He climbed into the truck bed, settled in amongst the parcels and packages, and watched Republic City slowly rise up around him as Tony Pops navigated the morning streets — towers of steel and glass and ancient stone all woven together into something that shouldn't have worked and somehow did.
I'll find you, Winter, he thought, his dark eyes scanning every face they passed. Just wait a little longer.
Elsewhere in the city, someone else was thinking almost the exact same thing.
She moved like she owned the street, which was generally how Winter moved through most spaces — not with arrogance exactly, but with the settled certainty of someone who had never particularly needed permission. Her silver hair was loose around her shoulders, catching the morning light. Her eyes, that same pale silver as her hair, swept every face and alleyway with the practiced precision of someone accustomed to tracking people across very large distances.
This was harder in a city.
The problem with cities, Winter had discovered in the past hour and a half, was that there were too many people in them. She could still feel the faint ember of Tohra's ki signature somewhere out there in the urban sprawl — her brother burned distinctive and hot, like a match dropped in a dark room — but with ten thousand other life signatures pressing in from every direction, it was like trying to listen for one voice at a concert.
She clicked her tongue.
"Gah. Where could he have gone?"
She had asked, at this point, approximately eleven different people. The answers had ranged from politely unhelpful to aggressively confused. Nobody had seen a large dark-skinned teenager with a tail and armor who had apparently fallen from the sky at some unspecified time this morning.
She was considering her next move when she heard it.
The particular quality of a confrontation — the low, swaggering voices, the deliberate menace in the footsteps. Her ear turned toward it with the automatic attention of someone who had grown up in environments where you learned to identify that sound early.
Around the corner of a produce stall, three young men in matching colors had backed a girl against the facade of a shop. The girl was dark-skinned and blue-eyed, dressed in earth-toned clothes that had the look of somewhere far from here. She held her ground with the steady posture of someone who absolutely knew how to handle herself — but one against three was one against three.
Winter considered this for approximately half a second.
Then she strolled into the middle of the street, tucked her hands loosely behind her back, and addressed the group with the mild, conversational tone of someone commenting on the weather.
"Now that's not very nice." She tilted her head at the three men. "Three boys against one girl. How about we even things up a little — two of us against you three?"
One of the thugs — the largest, seated in a vehicle nearby — unfolded himself from his seat with the slow, deliberate theatre of someone who was very used to their own size having an effect on people. He loomed. He did it quite well, actually. He stopped when he was close enough that most people would have taken a step back.
Winter looked up at him with an expression of total, absolute neutrality, the way one might look at a poorly made sign.
"Perhaps you don't know who we are, girly," the man said, his smirk broad and comfortable. "We're with the Triple Threat Triad. You're on our turf." He leaned closer. "Scram, little girl, before someone gets—"
Crack.
He reeled back. His hand flew to his jaw. Behind him, Winter lowered her arm from the whipping backhand she'd delivered mid-monologue and waited for the screaming in his skull to subside enough for him to process what had happened.
"Move," she said pleasantly, "or I'll do it for you."
The man's face cycled rapidly through pain, confusion, and outrage before landing — unfortunately for him — on outrage. He lunged forward and his hand closed around something soft and dark and attached to her.
The shift in Winter's expression was immediate and total.
Her tail, the same liquid black as her brother's, had been seized at its base.
💢
"THAT'S MY TAIL, YOU JERK—"
Her knee drove into his stomach with the mechanical precision of someone who had practiced that particular motion approximately ten thousand times and had never once needed to think about it since. The air left the man in a single, catastrophic rush. His grip on her tail went slack, and she stepped back, rubbing the base of it with an expression that had moved well past anger into something closer to cold, offended fury.
"Keep your grubby hands off of it," she said, almost to herself.
The man straightened — slowly, wheezing — and jabbed a finger at her. "You'll pay for that, little—"
She had already crossed the distance between them. The backfist caught him across the temple and deposited him directly through the shop window behind him in an eruption of glass and splintered wood.
"That," she said, dusting her hands off and turning back to the remaining two, "is why I told you to move."
From behind the standoff, the blue-eyed girl watched with an expression somewhere between impressed and thoroughly startled. She had expected the strange silver-haired newcomer to maybe help. She had not expected that.
The second thug — an earthbender, she could tell from his stance — brought both hands down and drove a slab of the road up toward the silver-haired girl with trained force. Winter's hand came up, fingers flat, and a sphere of pale light bloomed in her palm — then discharged outward in a controlled pulse that shattered the earthen projectile into powder.
The girl's eyes went wide.
A light bender—?
She had heard of them. Everyone had heard of them. Stories told in the same reverent, uncertain breath as legends — benders of the visible spectrum, rarer than dragons, almost never seen outside their own circles. She had never actually seen one. She had half-assumed they were exaggerated.
The sphere in Winter's palm suggested otherwise.
But there was no time to process it, because Winter had already closed the gap, driven her elbow into the earthbender's solar plexus, caught the snap of her tail mid-arc, and whipped it sideways with a sharp crack that sent the man through a second window.
Two down.
The blue-eyed girl, deciding she had watched long enough, turned back to the remaining firebender and took the fight into her own hands. The firebender's attack came forward — and was redirected, amplified, and returned at three times its original force, crashing against the man hard enough to send him through the third and final storefront with a sound like a small controlled demolition.
For a moment, the street was very quiet.
Then Winter turned, brushing glass off her sleeve, and looked at the other girl with something that might — on a less reserved face — have been a grin.
"Not too shabby," she said. "You're pretty good." She extended her hand. "My name's Winter. Yours?"
The girl reached out and shook it, smiling despite herself.
"Korra. Nice to meet you, Winter."
"Likewise."
They might have savored the victory a few moments longer, if the rumble of engines hadn't reached them both at the same moment — shortly followed by the distinct whine of distant sirens cutting through the morning air.
Winter turned. The thugs were stirring.
"Wait, Korra — don't be ha—"
She was already gone.
"You're not getting away!"
The earth beneath the fleeing vehicle buckled and heaved, a wall of street-stone crashing up underneath it and flipping the car end over end with a spectacular crash that scattered pigeons from three buildings simultaneously.
Winter exhaled. Rubbed her temple. Watched the thugs curl into groaning heaps as Korra efficiently went about tying them up.
She had a sinking feeling she knew exactly how this part was going to go.
She was right.
The police arrived in force — by road and by air, the latter via a broad, slate-grey airship that moved with ponderous authority over the rooftops. Metal benders descended from it on cables, their silver armor gleaming, and Korra's face lit up with the open delight of someone watching something genuinely extraordinary. Winter watched the airship with more guarded assessment, the same sinking feeling in her chest settling into quiet resignation.
"We caught the bad guys for you, officer!" Korra announced.
The officer in charge looked at the wreckage. The three broken shop windows. The overturned vehicle. The criminals tied up in the middle of a road that was now missing a significant portion of its surface.
Then he looked at the two girls responsible.
"You're under arrest," he said flatly. "Both of you."
Korra's expression went through offense, disbelief, and then a very fast calculation, because her polar bear-dog — the enormous, cream-and-grey creature she'd had since childhood, currently being restrained by four increasingly concerned officers — chose that moment to break free, bound to her side, and deposit her onto her back with practiced ease before loping away from the scene at speed.
That left one.
Winter raised both hands.
She'd seen this coming since the sirens.
The police station was, on the whole, exactly as uncomfortable as one might expect.
Lin Beifong had not gotten where she was by being a patient woman. She stood in the center of the holding area with the bearing of someone who had been personally inconvenienced by other people's poor decisions every day for twenty years and had simply gotten very, very efficient at expressing it. Her grey uniform was immaculate. Her expression was not.
She stared at the silver-haired girl sitting across from her with the same look one might aim at a minor structural anomaly in an otherwise sound building — not dangerous, but irritating.
"You know," she said, "most people resist arrest."
"I know," the girl said. She had a tail, which Lin had now confirmed with her own eyes three separate times and still didn't quite know how to file in any existing category. "But it wasn't my place. You're the police. Stopping crime within city limits is your jurisdiction, not mine. Acting as a vigilante in your domain, then also running from you when you responded appropriately?" She shook her head. "I was in the wrong. It didn't seem right to make things worse."
Lin looked at her.
There was a long pause.
The kind of pause that happens when an argument you were prepared to have simply fails to materialize because the other person didn't show up for it.
Tenzin, who had arrived shortly before to collect Korra, said nothing. Korra, who had been returned by Naga and was standing nearby in a state of mild residual indignation, also said nothing. They were both, in their separate ways, doing the math on what they had just heard.
A teenager. Brought in by the police. Sitting in a holding room. And her first impulse had been to agree with them.
Lin Beifong had arrested a lot of people.
She had never arrested anyone who opened with that.
The girl — Winter, she'd said her name was — tilted her head. "Would it be possible," she ventured, "to contact someone for me? I know I can't make up for the damage, but... my brother. We got separated when we arrived in the city. I've been looking for him."
Lin exhaled through her nose. The kind of exhale that is not a sigh but is functionally identical to one.
She looked at Tenzin.
"Take her with you," she said. "She's too honest to keep in here. I'd have her for a week."
Outside city hall, later that afternoon, Korra addressed a cluster of journalists with the practiced uncertainty of someone who had prepared a speech and found that the questions were all about something else entirely. Radios across the city crackled with her voice.
On a rooftop several blocks away, a man in a mask turned to a man in a hood.
"Sir? Should we proceed with the plan?"
The hooded figure was still. Then, slowly, he turned — just enough for the afternoon light to catch the hard lines of his jaw.
"The Avatar has arrived earlier than anticipated," Amon said. His voice was measured and unhurried, the voice of a man who had been planning for contingencies since before this particular contingency became necessary. "We'll simply have to accelerate."
He turned back to the city below, and the scene faded to dark.
And over the ocean, in the last light of dusk, two figures hung suspended in the air with the casual ease of people for whom gravity had always been optional.
"You sense them?" one asked.
The one called Tarro nodded slowly, his brown tail curling at his side in quiet thought. He wore a grey gi, cerulean boots, a white-and-blue undershirt, and a purple belt that had seen better days. His black eyes were fixed on the distant glow of Republic City's skyline.
"They're here," he said. "Both of them."
Beside him, Daikon — silver-haired, red-eyed, a sword sheathed at his back over a jacket as dark as deep water — crossed his arms.
"Do we warn them?"
"Not yet." Tarro's jaw tightened. "It's too soon. If we move now, we risk changing things before we understand what needs to change. History is fragile."
"History," Daikon said, with the dry precision of someone who had been having a version of this argument for some time, "is what Zamigra is planning to break. Isn't that why the Supreme Kai sent us here?"
Tarro was quiet for a long moment. The wind off the ocean moved through them both.
"You're right," he said at last. "But we have to be careful. Things could get a great deal worse before they get better — and only if we play this exactly right."
The two Saiyans looked at each other. An unspoken agreement passed between cousins, the kind built from years and shared purpose and the particular understanding of people who know they are carrying something heavier than themselves.
Then their ki ignited — twin pillars of light reflected in the water below — and they shot forward into the darkening sky, toward the city and the two signatures burning within it.
What dark fate moves beneath the surface of this world? What does Zamigra plan — and what are two Saiyans from across time and space prepared to sacrifice to prevent it?
Whatever comes next, it seems our siblings from beyond the stars have found themselves exactly where the story needs them to be.
For now.
NEXT TIME: Chapter II — Leaf in the Wind
Hey guys, Rosesaiyan2 here. Hopefully I didn't do too bad with this chapter. Sorry if the end feels a little rushed, I wanted to include as much of the cannon story that I can while also putting my own twist on how things might've played out if there were saiyans in the Legend of Korra story.
And yes, if you couldn't already tell this is a Tohra x Korra story (Sorry Korrsami fans. I don't write lesbian stories, nothing against those who do I just wasn't raised that way. Plus that'd make me feel really uncomfortable doing that. One thing I was a little disappointed about the cannon story was how Ikki didn't end up with anyone as she got older and how Mako ended up alone at the end of the series. With this story I plan to rectify those 2 things.
With that in mind, I'm thinking Ikki is older in this story than she was in cannon. It's just so she's closer to the age of the person she'll end up with, that also means Jinora and Milo will be older too. Also it wouldn't be a time travel story with out members of the time patrol in it. Any guesses as to who the villain of the story is? 😂 lolz This possibly can change though.
Lastly, since there are saiyans in the story I do have to bring in villains that can actually be a threat to them. Otherwise the story might get stale real fast. Already know who the first villain will be but what villains should I bring into the story in the future?
Golden Cell (no one's really explored this concept)
Bojack
Janemba
Super Buu (evil buu)
Xicor (Dragon ball AF)
Rigor (Dragon ball AF)
Akumo (Akumo father of all Saiyans - fan film by mastar media)
Other: dbz movie villain that I didn't mention
Turles (Dbz: Tree of Might)
Slug (Dbz: Lord Slug)
OC villain
Feel free to choose one guys or write in an option and msg me. I'm curious to find out what you guys choose. See ya in the next one!