[ Hei gathers her hair at the nape of her neck and wrings the water out. It's not deliberate so much as idle, half-distracted. Something curls quietly in his chest at her look, a vague feeling on the fringes of his awareness. (It's unease, maybe. She's still so naive about so many things. Outraged at being carried on wet tiles -- but perfectly happy to share a hotel room with a vicious stranger. Someone who's threatened her and her friends enough times.) ]

[ When he speaks, meeting her stare, his expression is dry. ] A safe-word. It's for a situation where you can't say No in the heat of the moment. But that word signifies that you want everything to stop. [ He doubts she'd understand the concept. Korra enjoys a rough-and-tumble, but on the whole she's dismally vanilla. The kinkiest she'd let him get would likely be anal sex -- actually, wait. In light of their tussles? Bloodplay. Give the girl some credit, she's growing up. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hei's known people who had different degrees of safewords. Others who claimed never to need them. They're not just common in bedrooms. He's used them on assignments too to categorize the level of risk in an environment. Red. Yellow. Green. ]

[ He remembers, dimly, an old joke he'd heard as a teenager: Why did Jesus die on the cross? Because he forgot his safeword. Korra wouldn't get that either. ]